Implementing the New Community Care

What were the aims of the new community care policy? How has the policy been implemented? How far have the aims of the policy been achieved?
These are just some of the questions addressed by the authors of this book. They trace the implementation of the 1990 community care legislation in five local authorities between 1992 and 1994. The book suggests that central government's main aim was to bring social security spending under control. Services issues were always secondary. Nevertheless, implications both for clients and services have been important and often unintended. Local authorities have faced considerable difficulties in implementing the legislation.
The process is followed in five local authorities, one county and four London boroughs. Local authorities were faced with a mass of central government guidance and a number of key changes to make. It traces three changes in detail: the implementation of the purchaser/provider split and the creation of a social care market, the introduction of care management, and efforts to collaborate with health authorities. The book compares how the authorities tackled these issues and examined why they approached the tasks so differently. It also analyses the way in which social services departments have changed in the process and the extent to which we are seeing the end of the 'Seebohm' Departments.
Implementing the New Community Care will be of interest to students of social policy, health and social welfare and social work.

Jane Lewis is Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. She was formerly a Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She has written (with Barbara Meredith) on informal care Daughters Who Care (1988) and on the voluntary sector Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work (1995), as well as on the development of health and family policy more generally. Howard Glennerster, Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics since 1984. Author of Implementing GP Fund holding, Paying for Welfare and British Social Policy since 1945.