Summary: It has been a very important concept that social work has to have a multi-functional relationship with social policy. As a Hungarian practitioner before WW II, Rezso Hilscher, the leading professional figure of the ‘Hungarian Settlement Movement’ wrote in his well-known paraphrase: “Social work personalizes the impersonal social policy” through the work of social workers.
Social policy itself can be divided into two major types. The statutory social policy (as a part of the general policy of the government, of the Parliament) decides about the values in social policy, and as a consequence, the social rights of people, the target groups of social provision, the responsibilities of the various participants of social activities (central bodies, local governments), and the resources to spend on social goals, etc., while the non-statutory social policy is offered by the civil sector, the market and the informal sector.