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As the state withdraws from welfare provision, the mixed economy of welfare – involving private, voluntary and informal sectors – has become ever more important. This second edition of Powell’s acclaimed textbook on the subject brings together a wealth of respected contributors. New features of this revised edition include:
• An updated perspective on the mixed economy of welfare (MEW) and social division of welfare (SDW) in the context of UK Coalition and Conservative governments
• A conceptual framework that links the MEW and SDW with debates on topics of major current interest such as ‘Open Public Services’, ‘Big Society’, Any Qualified Provider’, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and ‘Public Private Partnerships’ (PPP)
Containing helpful features such as summaries, questions for discussion, further reading suggestions and electronic resources, this will be a valuable introductory resource for students of social policy, social welfare and social work at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
The New Labour Government has placed great emphasis on service delivery. It has provided performance information in the form of Annual Reports, Public Service Agreements, Performance Assessment Frameworks, and a host of other targets. But has New Labour delivered on its welfare reform?
Evaluating New Labour’s welfare reforms:
provides the first detailed and comprehensive examination of the welfare reforms of New Labour’s first term;
compares achievements with stated aims;
examines success in the wider context;
contributes to the debate on the problems of evaluating social policy.
It is essential reading for academics and students of social policy and provides important information for academics and students in a wide range of areas such as politics, sociology, public policy, public administration and public management interested in welfare reform and policy evaluation.
Tony Blair was the longest serving Labour Prime Minister in British history. This book, the third in a trilogy of books on New Labour edited by Martin Powell, analyses the legacy of his government for social policy, focusing on the extent to which it has changed the UK welfare state. Drawing on both conceptual and empirical evidence, the book offers forward-looking speculation on emerging and future welfare issues.
The book’s high-profile contributors examine the content and extent of change. They explore which of the elements of modernisation matter for their area. Which sectors saw the greatest degree of change? Do terms such as ‘modern welfare state’ or ‘social investment state’ have any resonance? They also examine change over time with reference to the terms of the government. Was reform a fairly continuous event, or was it concentrated in certain periods? Finally, the contributors give an assessment of likely policy direction under a future Labour or Conservative government.
Previous books in the trilogy are “New Labour, new welfare state?" (1999) and “Evaluating New Labour’s welfare reforms" (2002) (see below). The works should be read by academics, undergraduates and post-graduates on courses in social policy, public policy and political science.
The New Labour government elected in May 1997 claimed that it would modernise the welfare state, by rejecting the solutions of both the Old Left and the New Right.
New Labour, new welfare state? provides the first comprehensive examination of the social policy of New Labour; compares and contrasts current policy areas with both the Old Left and the New Right and applies the concept of the ‘third way’ to individual policy areas and to broader themes which cut across policy areas.
The contributors provide a comprehensive account of developments in the main policy areas and in the themes of citizenship and accountability, placing these within a wider framework of the ‘third way’. They find a complex picture. Although the exact shape of the new welfare state is difficult to detect, it is clear that there have been major changes in areas such as citizenship, the mixed economy of welfare, the centrality of work in an active welfare state, and the appearance of new elements such as joined up government at the centre and new partnerships of governance at the periphery.
New Labour, new welfare state? provides topical information on the debate on the future of the welfare state and is essential reading for students and researchers in social policy, politics and sociology.
The inverse care law, which states that good medical care varies inversely with need, has become the conventional wisdom in a number of disciplines. However, studies which examine the spatial relationship between need and provision suffer from a number of weaknesses. These are outlined and then a number of studies are critically reviewed. It is concluded that the problems of measuring need and provision across areas make any firm conclusion about their relationship premature.
How did the UK Coalition Government’s policies differ from previous Conservative (or Labour) Government policies? How did the Liberal Democrats influence them? And what can this tell us about the likely policy direction of the Conservative government elected in May 2015?
Responding to the political and social policy changes made between 2010-15 this book considers the relationship between the two coalition parties to provide a critical assessment of how their policies affected the British welfare state, including the impact of ‘austerity’.
Looking beyond 2015, the contributors consider what the implications of these changes may be for social policy, both the challenges and opportunities, which will present themselves in the future.
This chapter contains an analysis of the development of the NHS under the Coalition Government. While some argue that under the Coalition Government the UK approaches the end of the NHS, the analysis shows that the reforms initiated by the Coalition Government have diverging directions and diverging ideological foundations. Whereas in the first part of the Coalition Government’s rule merely competition, privatization and marketization dominated the debate, the second part stills carries the heritages of the neo-liberal paradigm but also introduces other measures to improve the performance of the NHS and guarantee its financial sustainability: prevention, integration and localisation. But the question is if these initiatives are strong enough to guarantee a bright future for the NHS.
The author introduces the difficulty in conceptualising or measuring change in health systems. The author states that in this chapter draws on the account of Hall which differentiates between first, second and third order change. It views policymaking as a process that usually involves three central variables: the overarching goals that guide policy in a particular field, the techniques or policy instruments used to attain those goals, and the precise settings of those instruments. Hall regards change in settings as first order change; changes in instruments and settings as second order change; and changes in all three components – instrument settings, the instruments themselves and the goals – as third order or paradigm change. Implementing some aspects of this approach, this chapter tracks the main policy measures introduced by the Coalition’s Health and Social Care Act of 2012 backwards to the Conservative government of 1979.
This chapter examines the NHS in a cold climate of a decade of austerity. This period has first seen a broad move from the optimism of its 60th anniversary and greater pessimism of its 70th anniversary. Second, it has seen a game of two halves from a preoccupation with the reorganisation of the Lansley Health and Social Care Act towards ways of working around or undoing that reorganisation. One sad constant in the period is the continuation of Inquiries into failings in the NHS. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the ‘birthday present’ of increased funding associated with the NHS’ 70th anniversary, and some thoughts of the outlook of things to come. While the increased funding is welcome, it is unlikely to have the promised ‘transformatory’ effect because it is less than the NHS’ historical rate of funding increase; it includes promises that have been made in the past but have not been delivered, and excludes wider elements of health-related activity and social care. If life is to begin at 70 for the NHS, futures birthday presents for its 75th or 80th birthday must include greater integration with social care, perhaps a phoenix-like transformation into a National Health and Social Care Service.
In Essays on ‘the Welfare State’, Richard Titmuss (1963, p 53; note the use of inverted commas) pointed to ‘three different systems of social services’ (social, fiscal and occupational welfare) which ‘are seen to operate as virtually distinct stratified systems’. The Labour politician and author, Frank Field (1981) pointed to Britain’s five welfare states: the traditional welfare state; the tax allowance welfare state; the company welfare state; the private market state; and the unearned income from inherited wealth. This text focuses on these wider welfare states, which tend to be less visible than traditional state or ‘social’ welfare. The distribution of welfare services through a range of social mechanisms beyond the state itself has been termed ‘one of the most important categories in the contemporary study of social policy’ (Spicker, 2008, p 136). However, there seems to be no broadly accepted or dominant term to signal this welfare beyond the state. Different writers point to the mixed economy of welfare (MEW) (eg Murphy, 2006), welfare pluralism (eg Dahlberg, 2005), the welfare mix (eg Lee et al, 2016), the welfare triangle (Pestoff, 2014), the welfare diamond (eg Christensen, 2012) or the care diamond (eg Razavi, 2007). Most writers appear to use these terms broadly interchangeably (Johnson, 1999; Dahlberg, 2005).
Moreover, the MEW and SDW tend to be invisible or hidden. Burchardt and Obolenskaya (2016, p 217) state that the ‘pure public’ (public provision, finance, and decision) segment is what we might consider to be the archetypal post-war British welfare state. Prasad (2016) points to the terms that have been used to describe the ‘indirect’ and ‘private’ American welfare state: hidden, divided, submerged, and invisible.
