Social care under Blair

From a lukewarm beginning, New Labour’s social care policy has come to the boil, with the changes introduced symbolic of their ambiguous approach to public policy – full of rhetoric on individual empowerment, but relentless in the unshackling of private capital to develop services. This chapter looks at what, and how much, has changed in social care over the Blair years. It considers whether policy development reflects modernisation as conceptualised by 6 and Peck (2004), and evaluates the order of change, if any, from Conservative social policy using the Hall (1993) model. The law relating to social care has always been different in England and Wales from that of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but devolution has made changes in the social care arena in the four countries which have not always been congruent. These differences need to be acknowledged, and some are addressed.

Political science · Social care · Sociology · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Healthcare Systems and Challenges · Medicine · Nursing · Social Policy and Reform Studies