Introduction

Abstract

In the past few years social policy has risen to the top of the political agenda in Britain. The nature of the welfare state, having once seemed uncontroversial and even dull, is now deeply contested and its institutions subject to a seemingly permanent revolution. With the total bill for social provision topping £200 billion, there is little wonder that both cost-conscious politicians and tax-weary citizens should focus so single-mindedly on the welfare state. Yet these same politicians still want to deliver the social goods, not least because voter-citizens want not only lower taxes but also improved services. All the evidence suggests that modern Britons want more and better health services, greater educational opportunities and adequate pensions, however reluctant they may be to pay the taxes to fund them. In trying to conjure up this magic combination of better services and lower taxes, social policymakers face two further problems. First, there is the rapidly changing societal context in which policies have to operate, a setting of long-term mass unemployment, new patterns of family formation (and dissolution), medical innovation and rapid ageing. Second, it is widely argued that there is a loss of governing capacity amongst nation states as their policies become increasingly subject to patterns of global social and economic transformation that lie beyond their control.