In this year's Social Policy Review (SPR) we are pleased to be able to both keep to, and break with, tradition, in the time-honoured fashion that makes social policy as a discipline robust and challenging. We have kept our three-part structure, focusing on developments in the welfare state, a selection of papers commissioned from the Social Policy Association (SPA) annual conference, and a final section on the theme chosen by the editorial team – this year our theme is the issue of the rescaling of social policy and the governance challenges that presents to the welfare state. However, we have also taken the opportunity of the sixtieth anniversary of what many commentators recognise as the ‘founding’ of the modern welfare state in the UK – the instigation of the Beveridge reforms to tackle the ‘five evils’ – to commission a series of papers for the first section that take a much broader historical and theoretical overview of welfare developments than our usual annual focus. We hope our readers will find this a particularly useful resource, particularly as the social and economic climates in 2008–09 appear to indicate that the welfare state is about to experience the kind of upheaval we last experienced in the restructuring and rescaling of the 1970s. When our grandchildren come to edit Social Policy Review 81 in 2068 and reflect on the 120th anniversary of the Beveridge reforms, we trust this edition will prove an interesting marker in the development of welfare policy. We hope this is not misplaced confidence in the enduring significance of the welfare state and social policy.

Part One: Tackling Beveridge's ‘five evils’, 60 years on – Kirstein Rummery

Past editions of SPR have focused on giving readers a considered ‘round-up’ of contemporary developments in the ‘five pillars’ of the UK welfare state: social security, employment, education, health and housing. In the past few years the editors have struggled with this structure, as it no longer reflects the complexity of the modern welfare state, nor the contemporary issues it faces. Rather than trying to broaden the scope of this section to include every branch of the modern welfare state, we have chosen this year to take a more thematic, historical and theoretical approach.