The Market

Abstract

The provision of social services through the welfare state is often discussed by commentators as public provision of welfare — and this is contrasted with private provision arranged by individuals, families or organisations outside the state. This distinction between public and private welfare is a bit misleading, however, because much private provision is public in the sense that it is in the public domain and available to any would-be purchaser. Private health care, for instance, is publicly available, and indeed is advertised as such on television. The public-private distinction might, therefore, better be used to distinguish between individual and family-provided services and those provided collectively to a range of people either through the state or by other agencies. We will return in Chapter 6 to examine this ‘private’ dimension in more detail; but such a distinction is not one widely used in social policy literature.