Introduction

There have been massive shifts in the public policy agenda since the research that underpins this book was first mooted in the mid-1990s. The Conservative Party lost the 1997 election and hence their pursuit of ever more privatised and market oriented forms of welfare provision were called into question. Although the Labour Party fought the election with the slogan of the ‘Third Way’, it was not immediately apparent what the implications of this were to be for the welfare state in general (Powell, 1999) or community care in particular (Means and Smith, 1998b).

Manifesto commitments relating to community care were limited, but included the following:

• • civil rights to be developed for disabled people;

• • a long-term care charter to define standards;

• • independent inspection and regulation for residential and domiciliary care;

• • a Royal Commission to establish a fair system for funding long-term care.

Although implying something of a rights-based approach to community care for older people, Means and Smith (1998b, p 239) pointed out that “such optimism has to be tempered by the fact that the two biggest manifesto commitments of all were not to raise the basic rate of income tax and not to exceed the public expenditure plans of the previous administration for the next two years”.

Although these financial restrictions proved to be as limiting as feared, it did not stop a wide range of policy documents being published, which set out a radical reform agenda for the welfare state. In addition, the end of the two year public expenditure limit saw the Labour government in a position to invest considerable extra public expenditure on health and welfare services. In its July 1998 Local Authority Social Services Letter (98)13, the Department of Health announced the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review. Additional resources for the National Health Service (NHS) in England over the three year period 1999-2000 to 2001-02 amounted to £17.7 billion, and for the personal social services there was to be an additional £2.8 billion.

This chapter sets out the main components of this modernisation agenda as the key context for the empirical chapters of the book. The final chapter will draw the two strands together by reflecting on whether or not the new policy framework is as radical and different as claimed by the government.