In Chapter Two, Catherine Needham and Jon Glasby observe that ‘attitudes to risk and expectations of the state are essentially contested and yet are crucial to the deployment of social care policies’ (p 24). This chapter takes this observation further by interweaving the narratives of personalisation, risk and safeguarding. It draws on a set of research studies in which the implications of personalisation, risk and safeguarding have been debated. The studies include the evaluation of the individual budget pilots (Manthorpe et al, 2009, 2011), the evaluation of the test sites of self-directed support in Scotland (Hunter et al, 2012) and a study of the implementation of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and its interface with safeguarding policy and practice that was undertaken with the Alzheimer's Society (Manthorpe and Samsi, 2013). The context of these studies is also influenced by work on dementia and risk that was published as a set of guidance by the Department of Health, entitled Nothing ventured, nothing gained (Manthorpe and Moriarty, 2010) and on the Making Safeguarding Personal programme of practice development in the social care sector (see Klee and Williams, 2013; Manthorpe et al, 2014).

As a prelude to the chapter, this introduction briefly outlines what is meant by the term ‘safeguarding’ in the English context (in Scotland the term ‘adult protection’ is more commonly used [Johnson, 2012]). The term ‘adult safeguarding’ has a precise focus in social policy in England, being mainly used to describe the systems in place whereby public policy legitimates protection and enhances the human rights of vulnerable adults or adults at risk. Critiques of these concepts abound, such as the vagueness of the term ‘at risk’ (being at risk of what precisely?); whether the term ‘vulnerable adults’ focuses unduly on individual disability, frailty or impairment; whether the underlying values are paternal or over-protective; whether such terms minimise criminal activity as mistreatment or poor practice (Dixon et al, 2010) and thus deny victims access to justice (Dunn et al, 2008); or if such terms unduly focus on individual perpetrators rather than vulnerable situations or contexts (Burns et al, 2013).

This leads to observations on a second definitional debate around the specific term ‘risk’.