‘The shifting boundary between private and public responsibility for social welfare is one of the longue durée stories of Western history’, a number of commentators have suggested (Drakeford, 2008, p 163). As previous chapters have pointed out, the shift towards greater public responsibility after the Second World War met with a concerted check following the election of the Thatcher government 1979 and the Regan administration in 1980. The future was to be one of ‘customers not clients, purchasers not providers, managers not administrators, competition not allocation, regulation not planning and equality of opportunity not equality of outcome’ (Drakeford, 2008, p 163).

New Labour came to power in 1997 with the promise of modernising the welfare state rather than further privatising it. Yet public service modernisation policies continued aspects of neoliberal policy, it has already been argued, attempting to use social policy to complement rather than to challenge market imperatives (Page, 2007). As Chapter One has already pointed out, public service modernisation was also accompanied by the increasing use of performance targets and the promotion of private sector audit and management practices.

These forms of restructuring have typically impacted upon staff pay and conditions (Whitfield, 2006), potentially undermining staff morale. They have also been associated with the deskilling of professionals, reducing the scope for the use of professional judgement. Standing has described these processes in terms of ‘occupational dismantling’ – an ‘onslaught’ on the professions that is associated with neoliberal agendas more widely (Standing, 2011, pp 38–9).

While critics have pointed to the potentially negative implications for public service professionals and their clients, they have also pointed to the continuing scope for human agency (Newman and Clarke, 2009). Public service modernisation has been implemented in varying ways in different contexts. As Barnes and Prior also suggested, both professional practitioners and citizens have the capacity for counter-agency, as potentially ‘subversive citizens’ (Barnes and Prior, 2009, p 22). But counter-agency is not without its costs. ‘Managing the volatile intersection of needs, choices, resources and competing priorities will remain a site of intense emotional labour’, it has been argued (Clarke, Smith and Vidler, 2006, p 159). How do these debates apply to Law Centre staff and volunteers in the context of the Carter reforms and subsequent proposals for change?