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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2008.00723.x Byline: CHRISTINE BELLAMY (1), PERRI 6 (1), CHARLES RAAB (2), ADAM WARREN (3), CATHERINE HEENEY (4) Abstract: In recent years, there has been growing concern in the UK that local services aimed at risky or vulnerable people are ineffective, because of agencies' persistent failure to share information about their clients. Despite considerable national policy effort to encourage better information-sharing, previous research indicates that there are many cases where information is still not shared when it should be, or where it is shared when it should not be, with potentially devastating results. This article uses data from the largest empirical study of local information-sharing yet undertaken to examine four policy sectors where multi-agency working has come to the fore. It shows that variations in their information-sharing and confidentiality practices can be explained by neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and uses insights from this theory to argue that current policy tools, which emphasize formal regulation, are unlikely to lead to consistent and acceptable outcomes, not least because of unresolved conflicts in values and aims. Author Affiliation: (1)Christine Bellamy is Professor of Public Administration and Perri 6 is Professor of Social Policy in the Graduate School, College of Business, Law and Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University (2)Charles Raab is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh (3)Adam Warren is Researcher in the Department of Geography, Loughborough University (4)Catherine Heeney is Researcher in Sociology in the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. Article History: Date received 7 May 2006. Date accepted 12 November 2006.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in the autumn of 2001 that he wanted to extend individual consumer choice in the public services (Blair, 2001). What do we know from recent experience about the conditions under which such policies can be sustained? In this article, the experience of individual consumer choice over the last ten, and in some cases, fifteen years, is compared across nine fields of British public services. The article identifies the policy goals for introducing choice, considers how far they were typically achieved, and identifies problems and unintended side-effects, including distributional problems, inefficiencies and one type of political risk. This provisional evaluation is based on a widely ranging review of literature spanning several disciplines. The principal products of the argument are two detailed tables, setting out, respectively, the degree to which the goals seem to have been achieved for each choice programme, as far as the available literature can tell us, and how far distributional, efficiency and political risk problems have dogged consumer choice in each field. In the discussion section, trends and variations are summarised. Finally, some lessons are drawn from the comparisons, for policy makers who may be considering the further extension of consumer choice in public services.

Many of the public services for most of the century have been offered by the government. However, in the 1990s, they are being offered by non-state bodies such as organizations and agencies. Governments since 1970s have encouraged private agencies to give to charities in return for tax-breaks. The centrality of these developments has created a climate of politics of organizational form.

The tension between the goals of integrated, seamless public services, requiring more extensive data sharing, and of privacy protection, now represents a major challenge for UK policy-makers, regulators and service managers. In Part I of this article (see volume 83, number 1, pp. 11133), we showed that attempts to manage this tension are being made at two levels. First, a settlement is being attempted at the level of general data protection law and the rules that govern data-sharing practices across the public sector. We refer to this as the dimension of the governance of data sharing and privacy. Secondly, settlements are also being attempted within particular fields of public policy and service delivery; this we refer to as the dimension. In this second part, we enquire whether risks to privacy are greater in some policy sectors than others. We do this, first by showing how the Labour Government's policy agenda is producing stronger imperatives towards data sharing than was the case under previous administrations in three fields of public policy and services, and by examining the safeguards introduced in these fields. We then compare the settlements emerging from differing practices within each of these policy sectors, before briefly assessing which, if any, principles of data protection seem to be most at risk and in which policy contexts. Four strategies for the governance of data sharing and privacy are recapitulated namely, seeking to make the two commitments consistent or even mutually reinforcing; mitigating the tensions with safeguards such as detailed guidelines; allowing privacy to take precedence over integration; and allowing data sharing to take precedence over privacy. We argue that the UK government has increasingly sought to pursue the second strategy and that the vertical dimension is, in practice, much more important in defining the settlement between data sharing and privacy than is the horizontal dimension. This strategy is, however, potentially unstable and may not be sustainable. The conclusion proposes a radical recasting of the way in which the idea of a 'balance' between privacy and data-sharing imperatives is conceived.

The Labour government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 1997 made much of its commitment to 'joined-up working', by which it meant horizontal integration between policies and co-ordination across services. The particular manner in which it pursued this commitment has led to growing pressure for the sharing of citizens' personal information among public service agencies. Yet at the same time, Parliament was engaged in implementing the European Data Protection Directive with a new Data Protection Act and the Government was honouring its manifesto commitment to bring the European Convention on Human Rights - including its enshrined right to private life - into domestic law. Government has therefore been obliged to find ways of managing the potential tension between these commitments. There are two analytically distinct dimensions to the arrangements through which this is being attempted. First, the horizontal dimension consists in initiatives that apply across all policy fields, and includes the establishment of cross-governmental guidelines for implementing data protection law as well as the development of national policy on sharing personal data between public services. In 2002, the government published a major policy paper on data sharing and privacy. By late 2003, its approach to the need for legislation had changed sharply. The second analytically distinct dimension, the vertical dimension, consists in the laws, codes and norms developed in specific policy fields to govern relationships between data sharing and privacy within those fields. This two-part article discusses these arrangements. Part I analyses the horizontal dimension of the governance of data sharing and privacy. Part II (published in the next issue) examines the vertical dimension in three fields in which tensions between data sharing and privacy have come to the fore: community safety, social security and NHS health care. Four options for the governance of data sharing and privacy are analytically distinguished: (1) seeking to make the two commitments consistent or even mutually reinforcing; (2) mitigating the tensions with detailed guidelines for implementation; (3) allowing data sharing to take precedence over privacy; and (4) allowing privacy to take precedence over data sharing. The article argues that, despite its strong assertion of (1), the government has, in practice, increasingly sought to pursue option (2) and that, in consequence, the vertical dimension has become much more important in shaping the relationship than the horizontal dimension. The articles argue, however, that option (2) is a potentially unstable strategy as well as being unsustainable.

Five accounts of New Labour's style of public management reform can be identified in the recent academic literature. Although each has merits, none is wholly convincing. After a discussion of their scope and limits, this article offers a distinctive account, grounded in wider social theory, which also synthesizes the most valuable elements in the five mainstream accounts. The article then uses the case of New Labour's reforms of the mental health system to support this account, showing how it exemplifies each of the 15 major strands of reform activity that have together been the hallmark of what in practice New Labour has meant by 'modernization'. This provides the basis for a critique of the limits and dangers of the New Labour style.

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2008.00756_4.x Byline: Perri 6 (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Nottingham Trent University

The next UK recession is likely to cause many young, highly qualified individuals, living in the south of England, to experience redundancy. They will lose their jobs due to a decline in the business services sector as technology develops. The recession in the early 1980s resulted in fewer job opportunities for middle aged skilled manual workers. It is likely the next recession will occur during 1999. Some recessions do not cause business practices to alter or make major changes to the economy.

Sharing citizens' personal information is critical to the British government's commitments in public service reform. However, anxieties about the 'surveillance society' and large-scale data losses have undermined trust in public services' respect for confidentiality. The authors draw on their research to demonstrate the inadequacy of the current emphasis on formal regulatory instruments to guide public services in coping with dilemmas posed by these rival imperatives. They call instead for the development of self-confidence and skills in the exercise of professional judgement, and demonstrate the value of an heuristic framework drawn from risk analysis and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctive feature of the three Blair New Labour governments' domestic policy was the effort to change citizens' behaviour. Variously explained using such slogans as ‘something for something’, ‘responsibility’ and, in combating antisocial behaviour, ‘respect’, behaviour change was presented by the PM's Strategy Unit as an overarching strategic framework for policy. This included conditionality in welfare to work, health promotion campaigns, a ban on smoking in public places, measures to combat antisocial behaviour and enforce school discipline, home–school contracts, community cohesion and neighbourhood renewal programmes, measures to encourage car sharing and use of public transport, and others to promote domestic waste recycling. This article examines how far the two principal explanatory theories available predict that programme's characteristics. It uses a structured data set on the policy instruments, target groups and content of initiatives undertaken by eight central government spending departments. We find that indeed the strong (more coercive) tools are markedly concentrated on initiatives targeting the poor and low-income working strata. The expectations derived from the two theoretical traditions are not strongly supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a statement of a theory of the conditions under which are institutions, policies and arrangements viable or sustainable, rooted in the neo-Durkheimian tradition. The argument is that institutions have the greatest chance of viability when they exhibit sufficient internal variety of the basic institutional forms, and when the conflicts between these forms can be contained by one or more types of settlements. Institutional forms are subject to both positive feedback or self-reinforcement, which the Durkheimian tradition argues can lead to disorganization, and to negative feedback dynamics which can lead either to gridlock and conflict or, if suitably contained, to settlement. The article offers a classification of the available types of settlement between institutional imperatives and a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]