Partnerships, whether of the public–public or public–private variety, have become the sine qua non of British public policy, especially since the late 1990s, and, as Balloch and Taylor (2001b, p 2) state of partnership working, it is ‘a term that commands widespread support across the political spectrum’. However, working in partnership is not a recent phenomenon. Powell and Glendinning (2002) argue that partnerships have been a feature of public policy since the 1601 Poor Law, and Hudson et al (1999) note that in their 1909 Minority Report to the Poor Law Commission, social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb argued that in order to prevent poverty, different strands of policy and agencies needed to be brought together.

The journey towards partnerships becoming a common feature in public policy can be seen most clearly from the post-war period onwards. The command-and-control hierarchical approach characterised by ‘Old Labour’, which dominated much of the period up to the end of the 1970s as part of the post-war consensus, was seen as inadequate to tackle complex policy problems (Ling, 2002). However, the journey was not an entirely straightforward one and there were some wrong turns along the way that hindered progress. In particular, the market-driven approach of the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997 has been characterised as one that made coordination difficult due to the competitive element of policy whereby agencies were actively encouraged to compete, rather than cooperate, with one another in regard to funding and resources (Ling, 2002; Powell and Glendinning, 2002).

Although initially committed to abolishing the internal market in health, New Labour subsequently embraced, and even promoted, it under the rubric of a ‘third way’ (Hunter, 2008b). Of considerable appeal to its principal architect, Prime Minister Blair, the ‘third way’ approach was the principal driver of policy under New Labour when it formed the government in 1997 and it sought to reject both the hierarchical ‘command-and-control’ approach embraced by ‘Old Labour’ and the market-driven approach of the Conservatives, advocating instead a network or partnership approach to governance that was neither the state nor the market in their pure forms. The favoured mantra at the time was ‘what works is what matters’, and for New Labour, the public–private distinction was viewed as unhelpful and a brake on progress in improving the performance of public services.