Introduction

Three broad features identified in Chapter Two characterise the transitions in public services over some 25 years following the post-1948 welfare settlement, and form the focus of discussion for this and successive chapters. The first, on which this chapter concentrates, is an ideological commitment to the superiority of the market as a model for improving efficiency and effectiveness in public services. The second, closely linked to outsourcing, concerns the spread of New Public Management arrangements, involving increasingly centralised policy objectives and associated regimes of accountability in parallel with devolved services and responsibilities. The third feature, examined in Chapter Six, involves new governance models with projects and services planned, managed and delivered through cross-sector partnerships.

Underpinning changes in arrangements are major shifts in the ideology surrounding the public sector and the management of welfare services, coupled with a process of devolving services to non-state agencies. This has destabilised traditional structures and accountabilities, and local means of exerting power and influence. While outsourcing began during the previous Conservative government and was extended during the New Labour administration, the emphasis on competition and free markets together with the prominence of localism and devolving state responsibilities have intensified under the coalition government (McCall, 2011).

These changes have generated far-reaching consequences for different sectors over some 20 years, in particular encouraging significant shifts in emphasis for some voluntary sector organisations (VSOs), including rapid growth in service provision and substantial increases in paid workers. The voluntary sector (VS) has been subject to a process of organisational and ideological re-engineering alongside other sectors, but the effects of this have been slower to emerge in research. As Newman and Clarke (2009) identify in the public sector, the process has been complex and the new terrain contested, not only accommodated. This is the case also for the VS. New Labour's valuing of the third sector in its Third Way agenda and intentionally inclusive national and local compacts, together with an ongoing dialogue with national VS bodies, continued to promise improvements, curtailing criticism from some quarters (Kendall, 2010). However, many pledges were not borne out in practice. This interchange of discourse has continued in the coalition government's discussion of Big Society plans and the role for civil society and the VS.