Social policies concerned with the areas of social care and of social work as a profession have always been topics on which Pinker has made significant contributions. His writings more frequently and in more detail dealt with what are often referred to as the ‘personal social services’ than those of, say, T.H. Marshall, Richard Titmuss or David Donnison. In this book, we are covering, among other matters, Pinker's contributions to the interpretation of social policies affecting social work. However, his extensive contributions on what may be called the politics of social work as a profession or its governance will not be central to this study.

The Conservative Party won the general election in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. At that time, some communitarians, notably Roger Hadley and Stephen Hatch in Social Welfare and the Failure of the State (1981), wanted to enhance personal social services budgets in order to increase support for informal networks. Other social researchers simply called for more prominence to be given to the study of informal care, and to what extent ‘networks’ of care could be said to exist. Within this general context, the Conservative government set up a working party in 1980 to review the role and tasks of social workers.

As explained in the General introduction, Pinker was directly involved, being made a member of this working party (as was Hadley, with whom he disagreed on some key matters). Chaired by Peter Barclay, it completed its report, Social Workers: Their Role and Tasks, in 1982. Pinker's own contribution to that report was in fact a note of dissent, ‘An alternative view’. It became Appendix B (pp 236–62) of the report, and it summarised the reasons why Pinker dissented from the main recommendations. Pinker's dissent is frequently cited in discussions relating to the historical and current practices of social care and social work, and now arguably more so than the main report itself. Since ‘An alternative view’ is no longer at all easy to obtain (nor indeed is the main report), we have made a point of including the full text of ‘An alternative view’ in this part as Chapter Six.