Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- one Introduction: modernising the welfare state
- two The NHS after 10 years of New Labour
- three Housing policy: coming in out of the cold?
- four Social security and welfare reform
- five Social care under Blair: are social care services more modern?
- six Education: from the comprehensive to the individual
- seven Controlling crime and disorder: the Labour legacy
- eight Social investment: the discourse and the dimensions of change
- nine Risk and the Blair legacy
- ten Going private?
- eleven Choice in public services: ‘no choice but to choose!’
- twelve The conditional welfare state
- thirteen The stages of New Labour
- fourteen Social Democratic reforms of the welfare state: Germany and the UK compared
- fifteen Conclusion: the Blair legacy
- Index
- Also available from The Policy Press
ten - Going private?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- one Introduction: modernising the welfare state
- two The NHS after 10 years of New Labour
- three Housing policy: coming in out of the cold?
- four Social security and welfare reform
- five Social care under Blair: are social care services more modern?
- six Education: from the comprehensive to the individual
- seven Controlling crime and disorder: the Labour legacy
- eight Social investment: the discourse and the dimensions of change
- nine Risk and the Blair legacy
- ten Going private?
- eleven Choice in public services: ‘no choice but to choose!’
- twelve The conditional welfare state
- thirteen The stages of New Labour
- fourteen Social Democratic reforms of the welfare state: Germany and the UK compared
- fifteen Conclusion: the Blair legacy
- Index
- Also available from The Policy Press
Summary
Introduction
The opening chapter to this book (Chapter One) provided a comprehensive taxonomy of the ways in which the term ‘modernisation’ in the Blair years was deployed by the government and understood by those who sought to analyse it in action. This chapter focuses on just one of those conceptual categories, the sense in which modernisation has been used to mean a preference for, and a replacement by, private sector means and methods for those utilised in and by the public sector. In doing so private welfare is understood in three main ways (Drakeford, 2000):
• as the ownership of assets and whether they lie in public or private hands;
• as the provision of welfare services – whether the state directly supplies such services, or whether it ‘outsources’ or subcontracts that responsibility to a private sector provider;
• as the allocation of responsibilities between the state and the individual – to find a job, for example, or to deal with the collapse of a private pension plan.
Running through all of these is the question of zeitgeist – whether the underlying set of fundamental attitudes and beliefs that the Blair governments brought to this question of welfare amounts to the sort of disjunctive step-change that Hall (1993) identifies.
Just three notes of caution are needed before the main discussion of the chapter begins. Firstly, as Burchardt et al (1999, p 1) point out, ‘Welfare has never been the exclusive preserve of the state’. Private welfare has always been a substantial player in the lives of many citizens. Secondly, this chapter focuses on the English welfare state under New Labour. Devolution means that a chapter that focused on private welfare in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland would be very different.
Thirdly, the chapter organises itself around four of the ‘five giants’ of the Beveridge report. Social services are not discussed here because, to a degree not shared by the other four, they remained, throughout the postwar era, characterised by a wide mixture of public, voluntary and commercial providers. Discussion of private welfare in this field can be found in Jordan (2004), Netten (2005), Drakeford (2006) and Scourfield (2007).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernising the Welfare StateThe Blair Legacy, pp. 161 - 178Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2008