Many social security institutions are in the process of reforming their disability benefit programmes in an effort to reduce historically high numbers of beneficiaries on the rolls.

This brief will discuss the causes of this high recipient rate and will describe current disability benefit reform measures aimed at addressing the problem. It will then explore the policy reasons behind these different reform measures and examine how different types of reform measures might best address those policy concerns.

A report of a workshop held in Oxford in June 2008.

Recently, the social contract has been seen as a device for identifying the moral principles that ought to govern relations both amongst the members of society, and between the members of the society and their government. There is more emphasis placed here on the positive moral principles that ought to govern the political arena.

There exists a widespread conviction that pension protection, along with many other social benefits, is slowly being eroded as responsibility for insurance and the associated costs are shifted steadily from government and employers to individual citizens and their family members.

But was there really a ‘golden age’ of pension protection? If so, what are the causes that undermined these guarantees, and what are the policy parameters and defining characteristics that have shaped pension policies during the last couple of decades?

This report provides both a record and a critical assessment of the first workshop of the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society Programme on The Social Contract Revisited: The Modern Welfare State. The workshop was held in Oxford on 18-20 April 2007.