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‘Neighbourhood’ was a key political and administrative concept for the New Labour administration and was the spatial focus for a proliferation of initiatives in the early period. Yet since 2006, the appeal and use of ‘neighbourhood’ have waned as evidence of the impact of neighbourhood interventions over the last decade has emerged, along with active re-scaling of policy for regeneration and economic development. This article seeks to draw out why ‘neighbourhood’ was important to the New Labour project, to examine why and how this changed over the course of the New Labour administration, and to explore new agendas emerging in policy for sub-national governance.
The voluntary sector was central to the COVID-19 response: fulfilling basic needs, highlighting new and existing inequalities and coordinating action where the state had been slow to respond.
This book curates rigorous academic, policy and practice-based research into the response and adaptation of the UK voluntary sector during the pandemic. Contributions explore the ways the sector responded to new challenges and the longer-term consequences for the sector’s workforce, volunteers and beneficiaries.
Written for researchers and practitioners, this book considers what the voluntary sector can learn from the pandemic to maximise its contribution in the event of future crises.
The introduction sets out the themes of the book, in particular the recent historical and policy context in the UK. It sets out the book’s overall aim of providing a concise and up-to-date overview of the third sector’s role in England’s public services. It provides a detailed definition of the third sector, introducing some of the main theories of the voluntary sector. It goes on to outline the key policy context, particularly the important New Labour partnership era. It also scrutinizes the important state-sector relationship at the heart of public service delivery. Finally, it highlights the contents of the book.
This chapter focuses in greater detail on the crucial New Labour and Coalition government periods; comparing and contrasting the policy and practice of the two periods. It has two broad aims: to provide a historical overview of policy, practice and academic debates that have surrounded the often controversial role of the third sector in public service delivery; and to tease out underlying continuities and points of difference in the stances of these governments towards the sector. The analysis is framed by the welfare triangle developed by Adalbert Evers, with a consequent focus on the interfaces with the state, market and informal sectors. Whilst shifts in discourse and practice are detected, the chapter identifies an underlying continuation of trajectories initiated in the 1980s including movement towards market-based forms of provision, the reduction of the scale of the welfare state, and aspirations to harness the perceived positive contribution of the third sector.
The conclusion draws together the themes and questions of the book, highlighting the enduring nature of the tensions implicit in the service delivery relationship. It provides a review of where the third sector currently sits in the contemporary landscape of public service delivery, focuses on the dilemmas and tensions that service delivery brings to participating organisations, and highlights the key role of innovation and the search for new models of delivery that the third sector has taken part in. Finally it reviews the prospects for the third sector’s future role in service delivery, balancing reasons to be pessimistic and optimistic.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of the third (or voluntary) sector role in the delivery of public services in the UK. It covers social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value; as well as the sector’s role in specific fields including employment, health and social care, housing and criminal justice. It is the first book to review developments over the New Labour and Coalition period which saw a sustained expansion of the scale and scope of third sector delivery. In this period, the sector was required to respond to new policy challenges such as personalisation, market-based mechanisms of funding allocation and regulation, and an increased focus on rewarding outcomes (payment by results). Drawing on research at the ESRC-funded Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, the book also makes an analytical contribution in charting historical shifts in state, third sector, and market relationships, with a focus on the controversies associated with such shifts.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of the third (or voluntary) sector role in the delivery of public services in the UK. It covers social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value; as well as the sector’s role in specific fields including employment, health and social care, housing and criminal justice. It is the first book to review developments over the New Labour and Coalition period which saw a sustained expansion of the scale and scope of third sector delivery. In this period, the sector was required to respond to new policy challenges such as personalisation, market-based mechanisms of funding allocation and regulation, and an increased focus on rewarding outcomes (payment by results). Drawing on research at the ESRC-funded Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, the book also makes an analytical contribution in charting historical shifts in state, third sector, and market relationships, with a focus on the controversies associated with such shifts.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of the third (or voluntary) sector role in the delivery of public services in the UK. It covers social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value; as well as the sector’s role in specific fields including employment, health and social care, housing and criminal justice. It is the first book to review developments over the New Labour and Coalition period which saw a sustained expansion of the scale and scope of third sector delivery. In this period, the sector was required to respond to new policy challenges such as personalisation, market-based mechanisms of funding allocation and regulation, and an increased focus on rewarding outcomes (payment by results). Drawing on research at the ESRC-funded Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, the book also makes an analytical contribution in charting historical shifts in state, third sector, and market relationships, with a focus on the controversies associated with such shifts.
Conventionally we think of the welfare state in terms of the state: what it provides by way of welfare services, what it costs to provide them, and what they achieve. However, as the chapters in this book amply demonstrate, this is at best a narrow conception of welfare and of the services, policies and practices operating to promote it. This chapter looks beyond the state at the vast array of non-profit making organisations and services in the voluntary and community sector. It does not remove the state from the picture, however. The state is heavily involved and implicated in the way the voluntary and community sector has developed, the roles it plays and the way it operates. The relationship between the state and the voluntary and community sector remains an ongoing tension, where increasing concern over threats to the independence of the sector have been voiced in recent years.
After some introductory discussion of context and definition, the chapter looks in turn at data on the voluntary and community sector’s scale, scope and activities; gives an overview of its historical development in welfare services from the late Victorian era; then looks more closely at the sector’s experience from the New Labour governments through to Brexit. The chapter concludes by considering the main challenges facing the sector and, finally, its future prospects.
In the discussion we refer to the voluntary and community sector, but this presents readers unfamiliar with the field with two immediate problems: first, what do we mean by ‘voluntary and community’, and, second, what is implied by the idea of ‘sector’? The first problem is compounded by the existence of multiple alternative labels which are intended to cover more or less the same territory.
