There has been growing interest in narrative approaches to policy that focus on how policies are framed as stories in order to build coalitions of support (Hajer, 1995; Yanow, 1996, 2000; Fischer, 2003). Such interpretive approaches to policy have also drawn attention to the ways in which academics themselves offer narrative interpretations of those policies: ‘stories about stories’ (Yanow, 1996). This layering of interpretation is very evident in relation to the recent changes to English social care services that are commonly referred to as personalisation. Personalisation has been variously described as a script, a rhetorical device and a set of stories that are told about care services and the people who use and work with them (Leadbeater, 2004; Needham, 2010b, 2011a; Ferguson, 2012). What is increasingly evident is that there are also lots of stories that academics and other stakeholders tell about personalisation: its genesis; its implementation; its impact; its future. These are not stories in the sense of being fictional or trivial. Rather they are competing narratives, which explain the past, present and future of personalisation in different ways.

The policy context

Perhaps the least contested element of personalisation is its policy locus. In a public policy context – as opposed to retail or technology where the term is also used – personalisation is usually applied to a set of policy changes to adult social care services in England from the mid-2000s. The term itself is commonly attributed to Charles Leadbeater in a 2004 Demos pamphlet in which he set out the key tenets of a personalised approach to public services, drawing on examples from social care (Leadbeater, 2004). The first major government policy statement on personalisation was the 2007 Putting People First concordat, signed by central government, local government and the social care sector (DH, 2007). This of course is not to claim that the policy sprang from thin air in the mid-2000s; its antecedents are highly contested, as discussed in the next section. However, a brief recent history can be sketched out with some confidence.

The 2007 Putting People First concordat set out the direction of adult social care reform over the next ten years.