The boundaries between state and charitable activities within the NHS are set out in regulations but are also enacted, blurred, and contested through local practices. This article reports research on NHS Charities– charitable funds set up within NHS organizations to enhance statutory provision – in Scotland. We analysed financial accounts and conducted qualitative interviews with staff in 12 of the 14 NHS Charities in Scotland, where they are generally known as endowments. Our findings suggest that Scotland’s endowments are relatively wealthy in charitable terms, but that this wealth is unevenly distributed when population size and socio-economic deprivation are considered. We also identify two diverging organisational approaches to decisions, including those about appropriate and inappropriate fundraising. We argue that these approaches cohere with contrasting ‘state’ and ‘charitable’ institutional logics, which in turn imply different attitudes to potential inequalities, and to relationships with local publics.

The role of religion in social welfare provision, and more broadly in shaping the development of state social policy in the UK, has become an issue of increasing prominence in the last decade raising both new challenges and opportunities. This article brings together new and existing research in the field of religion and social action/welfare in the British context to present a preliminary discussion of how and why religion, as a source of social identity and moral values, matters for social policy. The key argument is that religious welfare provision goes beyond the mixed economy of welfare paradigm and has the capacity to challenge the Utilitarian underpinnings of mainstream social policy thinking by giving more relative importance to ethical issues such as self-knowledge and morality, in addition to the more conventional concepts of wellbeing or happiness. The article proposes the concept of ways of being in order to bring together these moral ideational factors that underpin social welfare.

Social science researchers in the UK now accept that religion has returned to public life (Spalek and Imtoual, 2008; Dinham and Lowndes, 2009), after what has been described by Gorski (2005) as a considerable period of ‘intellectual and political repression’ that began in the post-World War II era. This lasted until around the beginning of the 1980s when political events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the rise of the ‘moral majority’ in North America and the spread of religious political mobilisation across the world, forced social scientists to recalculate their predictions about the effective demise of religion which had been considered to be a direct consequence of processes of modernisation (Casanova, 1994; Gorski, 2005; Habermas, 2006).