Reforming Welfare is a series of lectures and essays delivered by Frank Field during his time both as Chairman of the Social Security Select Committee and lately as Minister for Welfare Reform. It includes his speech to the Social Market Foundation on Labour’s strategy for reforming the welfare state and provides the most complete picture to date of the principles underlying Field’s approach.

In this collection he addresses issues such as the detterent effect of means testing on honesty; the need to move away from an impersonal, statist approach to welfare to one based on mutual aid, and the fact that compassion should not be measured by the size of the social security budget but by the opportunities created for the poor.

Throughout this paper, Field comes back time and again to a single point: that attempts to dispense social assistance which do not go with the grain of human nature and do not work with the inherent desire to improve ourselves and our conditions are bound to end in failure.

With an introduction by Nicholas Timmins, public policy editor of the Financial Times and author of The Five Giants, the definitive history of the welfare state, Reforming Welfare offers a comprehensive guide to the thinking of one of Labour’s most imaginative and eloquent advocates for changing the role of the state.