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).