Capital to the rescue? New Labour’s business solutions to old welfare problems

Abstract

Business people, business associations and individual firms have been enlisted in various ways by New Labour as part of their strategy to identify and resolve a number of problems within the British welfare state. Business has been important to New Labour’s welfare strategies in at least three ways. First, New Labour has endeavoured to gear social policy more towards the needs of the profit making sector in the hope that this would increase competitiveness and help it to expand welfare expenditure in future. Second, by increasing the inputs of business people and firms into social policy, the government hoped to rescue services from their inefficient public sector strait-jackets. Third, the government has looked to private firms as important new sources of financing for welfare infrastructure. However, this embedding of business culture, business people and private enterprise into social policy has produced few real benefits to services, their employees or their users. This paper examines and evaluates New Labour’s strategy of embedding business into social policy in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of welfare services.