Hartley Dean is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, having joined the Department of Social Policy in 2002. He previously held posts at the Universities of Luton and Kent. However, his 40 year academic career had been preceded by a 12 year career as a front-line welfare rights worker at a community-based independent advice centre in Brixton, South London, which is where the practical foundations of his commitment to social policy were laid.

Hartley’s principal research interests have stemmed from his concerns with poverty, social justice and welfare rights. His academic research had drawn primarily upon qualitative methods and extended, on the one hand, to the investigation of people's everyday experiences of poverty, social exclusion and welfare intervention, and on the other, to the ways in which people's understanding of human needs and social rights are socially and discursively constructed. While his empirical work had been largely UK focused, in his later writing he has engaged more widely with rights-based approaches to social welfare and conceptual issues relating to human need in a broader global context. Among his more recently published books are Social Policy (Polity, 2006, 2012 & 2019), Understanding Human Need (Policy/Bristol University Press, 2010 and 2020) and Sociality: Social Rights and Human Welfare (Routledge, 2025). He has also contributed to a wide range of edited books and published in a spectrum of academic journals. He is a past editor of the Journal of Social Policy. He retired in 2019, but continues to undertake peer-review work, to write and to publish. He was conferred a Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2025.