6 - The governance of social policy under the Conservatives

Summary

Introduction

With the different emphases and approaches of successive governments to social policies from the 1980s onwards, it has become increasingly apparent that the means of policy formulation, implementation and evaluation can be as important as the policies themselves (Bochel and Bochel, 2018). The move away from the postwar preference for direct provision by the state, funded by general taxation, towards one for competition, markets and market-like mechanisms that started under the Thatcher governments, in particular, highlighted that the use of such approaches to deliver public services is likely to contribute to different outcomes, such as greater inequality, than universal provision by the state, at the same time as shifting responsibility away from the state and towards individuals and families.

As not only policies changed, but also the style and means of policy making and implementation altered, and the role of the state was reduced in many areas, the use of the term ‘governance’ could be seen as trying ‘to make sense of the changing nature of the state’ (Richards and Smith, 2002, p 14) and came to be associated, for many, with a shift in the role of the state from central command and control to a position where power and responsibility are spread across a wider variety of different actors and organisations at local, regional, national, transnational and global levels, resulting in a more fragmented and less coherent process of policy making and implementation.

The changing governance of social policy, 1979– 2015

Arguably it was the changes made by the Thatcher governments, to policies and to the ways in which they were made and implemented, that encouraged many to reconsider the importance of different approaches, including for social policy. In particular, from 1988 there was a shift towards policy making strongly influenced by the neoliberal views of the New Right (for example, Rhodes, 1997; Williams, 2021), with a preference for a smaller state and a free market, and with greater competition and consumer choice being seen as ways through which self-interested, inefficient state bureaucracies (Niskanen, 1971) could be reduced and controlled. This, and the increased emphasis on efficiency, effectiveness and economy, saw a variety of changes being introduced that have continued to shape policy making and implementation.