Richard Titmuss's ‘The Social Division of Welfare’ has been neglected as a framework for assessing changes in social policy and society. The analytical, as opposed to the descriptive, value of the original essay becomes more evident, and more significant, when the relations between the social divisions of labour and welfare are examined in terms of the distribution of benefits and services through the public, fiscal and occupational systems; the growth and differential recognition of needs and ‘man-made’ states of dependency; the variations in the primary objectives of welfare including control; the interrelationship of the different systems and the ways in which they legitimate the existing social structure. This paper seeks to show that, combined with a consideration of power and the state, time and security and the institutions of capitalism, the ideas of the original essay encourage a more dynamic analysis of the impact of the three systems of welfare on society than has so far been attempted.

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The significance of the tax system in assisting the development and expansion of non-state pensions has received very little attention at a time when concern has been generally increasing over the costs of public social security programmes, and particularly their pension systems. However, the limited evidence available indicates that the amount of tax revenue foregone in promoting this particular form of saving can be considerable. The distributive implications of the various tax reliefs also tend to be neglected, even though they play an important part in reinforcing inequalities in old age. This article seeks to explore the published information on the nature and scale of fiscal privilege for non-state pensions across countries and examines the way in which one country, the United Kingdom, estimates the costs of these tax benefits. Examination of the detailed evidence raises questions about the workings of these tax benefits in terms of equity and privilege, of cost and value for money. It supports the case for the development of more visible and publicly accountable estimates of these tax benefits, comparable across countries (as with public expenditure), as well as the better integration of tax and public spending in meeting needs during retirement.

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The article reviews the limited existing social policy literature on taxation and sets out a case for the incorporation of the study of taxation into the accepted remit of social policy. Social policy has historically been concerned with the services and benefits which flow from public expenditure, and people’s experiences of them, rather than with taxation, and the contributions by individual researchers have tended to remain marginal to the main focus of social policy. The article offers a speculative account as to why taxation has remained peripheral to social policy and presents three arguments for the mainstreaming of tax in social policy’s domain of study. These concern the role of taxation in shaping the distribution of resources, a fundamental pre-occupation of social policy; the contribution social policy scholars can make to shaping a new discourse surrounding taxation, foregrounding issues of equity and need; and how social policy’s engagement with taxation can influence the politics of the welfare state.