Continuity and change in the public services

Abstract

The modern public services in the United Kingdom (UK), defined broadly as the activities of central and local government, can be examined in two ways. They can be seen as ‘providers’, that is those state organizations which supply goods and services to its citizens, according to their personal needs and irrespective of their ability to pay for them. Alternatively, they can be viewed as the ‘outputs’ of state organizations, to which the state’s citizens are entitled, normally free at the point of use, on the principle of either universality or, sometimes, selectivity. In this book, we use the term public services mainly in the former sense, namely as organizations providing a range of benefits to people, as citizens or members of the state, according to individual or collective need. This highlights the major distinction between the public services and private-sector organizations: the former have politically-driven goals and the latter market-driven ones.