Part One - UK social policy

Summary

This section examines some of the major concerns of the current New Labour government's social policy from a number of different perspectives. David Gladstone begins by examining community care and integration over a long time scale, and shows that ‘community care’ (unlike sexual intercourse) did not begin in 1963 between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. While the 19th century saw a significant degree of institutional expansion, recent historical research has begun to question the pervasiveness of institutional segregation in earlier periods. Family and community care remained important, with great permeability of the boundaries between institution, family and community, and with movement in and out of specialist institutions. Moreover, the inter-war period saw the development of a type of institution along the lines of the colony model, much different from the barrack-like institutions that had developed in the 19th century. However, Gladstone shows that mechanisms of control could exist ‘outside the walls’ of institutions. He concludes that integration, far from being a creation of policies from the 1960s, can be seen as one of the most important continuities that link contemporary issues and debates about the locus of care to much earlier periods of British social policy.

In the following chapter Richard Parry analyses the ‘invest and reform’ strategy, focusing on the ‘big idea’ of Public Service Agreements (PSAs). He argues that the strategy misappropriates both words: ‘investment’ is seen as any current expenditure the government chooses to favour, while ‘reform’ disguises moves towards a more rigorous and market-oriented public sector labour market. If one of the favoured services is ‘education, education, education’, then the larger increase for the other priority might justify ‘NHS, NHS, NHS’. However, with only small increases in other areas such as social security and with increases in the size of the economy, public spending as a percentage of GDP was lower in 2001/02 than it was in 1997/98. Parry views PSAs as a blunt instrument. For example, it is difficult to detect failure to achieve the PSA targets as they change in number and composition over time. Moreover, success appears to be defined by the spending departments rather than the Treasury, and the result of failure is that ‘support and advice’ are offered, rather than the ‘name and shame’ approach taken to some aspects of public services.