It is quite often that not all ideas for change will become a policy, this is mainly due to the political and economic constraints which the success of the social policies relies on. An example of economic constraints in action was recent reform of legal aid. The role of legal aid is to ‘help meet the costs of legal advice, family mediation and representation in a court or tribunal’ (Gov.co.uk, 2018). When this programme was first introduced, it covered all aspects of law and court proceedings, however cuts introduced withdrew ‘£350m from the £2.2bn legal aid scheme by removing entire areas of law from public funding, including nearly all family advice’ (Robins, 2012). This means that it will now become very difficult for individuals, who struggle with funding, to get divorces if they are in difficult situations such as an abusive marriage or have too many children to look after and so are unable to afford the prices. Consequently, the impact of this social policy reform is very harsh on some recipients and demonstrates how some social policies cannot be very far fetching due to a lack of funding. Therefore, unfortunately sometimes some social problems cannot be viable on an economic or political basis, stunting any possibility for a social policy to be made as a solution.

To conclude, the concept of need is so important in social policy as it is the main basis of knowledge that is needed to understand the unmet needs causing the social problem. This understanding then leads to suitable social policies being implemented as a solution. However, the making of social policy is a very complicated process that involves taking many different factors into consideration. Although there are a number of different factors that should be considered, it is arguable that the factors of external pressure, the media and individuals, and economic and political constraints are the most influential factors in the making of social policy.