When the Labour Party was swept back into power on 1 May 1997, with an unprecedented majority and the realistic prospect of securing two full terms in government, the reform of the welfare state was high on its to-do list. What this actually meant was not always clear. Reportedly, when Tony Blair called Alan Milburn three days after the election to invite him to be the new minister of state for health, he told him ‘We haven't got a health policy … Your job is to get us one’ (Timmins, 2017: 589). But the broad agenda for welfare, and its centrality to the New Labour project, seemed clear enough. Three of the five pre-election pledges made by the party concerned welfare: reducing class sizes, shortening NHS waiting lists and getting 250,000 young people off benefits and into work. There were two key components to this agenda: the first was to encourage the move ‘from welfare to work’, captured in the mantra ‘work for those who can, security for those who cannot’; the second was to direct greater resources into public services, and to achieve a step-change in the quality of provision. As we already have a number of excellent accounts of this reform programme, I confine myself here to a brief reminder of Labour's policy agenda (among others, Ludlam and Smith, 2004; Powell, 2008; Timmins, 2017). I devote rather more attention to the outcomes of these reforms, as this has been less comprehensively covered and is the source of considerable misunderstanding – and misrepresentation. In the final part of the chapter, I explore the claim that between 1997 and 2010 New Labour somehow manged to forge a ‘new’ sort of social democracy. In fact, I think that it is more appropriate to think of this as the last social democratic welfare state of its kind.

The New Labour programme

New Deals

The earliest and definitive expression of New Labour's first welfare commitment was the New Deal. Originally created for 250,000 under 25 year olds who had been unemployed for six months or more, the programme combined work or work experience, training or education, all with the support of a personal adviser. Benefit payments were made conditional upon participation in the programme. Further New Deals were introduced across time for the long-term unemployed, for lone parents, for the over 50s and for disabled people.