In the past many of the leading figures in social policy writing had interests in history – for example Richard Tawney, T.H. Marshall, and Richard Titmuss. However, social policy has lost its ‘historical imagination’, with many students – Thatcher's children, and in a few years Major's children – not being exposed to social policy history, and with many publishers believing that anything before 1997 or even 2001 belongs to ‘history’ rather than ‘social policy’. The papers in this section were originally delivered to the ESPAnet conference in Copenhagen in September 2003. As will be evident, contributors take rather different views of how the historic past can help in understanding or informing policy formation and implementation, although what unites them is that historical understanding is important in social policy analysis.