Children’s centres were established to act as a wrap-around service-hub, designed to ensure ‘every child mattered’. At the local authority level children’s centres developed from Sure Start children’s centres which were based on a family support ethos (Featherstone et al, 2013), whereby children from deprived postcode areas were assured a nursery placement (Eisenstadt, 2011). Sure Start children’s centres were located in areas of ‘high disadvantage’, and provided a service that gave access to 0–5 year old children for 10 hours a day, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year. In areas of ‘less disadvantage’ the offer provided was a ‘drop in’ arrangement with hours to ‘suit local need’ (Barker, 2009). As part of their offer, these centres hosted statutory and voluntary services for children and families including access to Job Centre Plus employment advice, various health services (with access to midwives and health visitors) and education services. In targeted areas further support was available including access to police and legal advice in a bid to tackle domestic violence. The links to employment services for parents included a joined-up approach to training providers, some of whom were also located in some children’s centres. Signposting was also part of the children’s centres’ remit, to include benefits advice along with library services and relationship support, although these services may not have actually been provided on the site of the children’s centre (Barker, 2009).
The children’s centres arrangement to facilitate multi-agency working was replicated by organisations such as social care services and education that were physically and geographically restructured so that a variety of multi-agency workers shared buildings. New Labour’s (1997–2010) intention was that any child who had needs identified under a ‘common assessment framework’ would be best served at a single point of access, by a lead professional and would have the support of a team around the child, as opposed to the child and their family being seen in isolation by a variety of professionals. Professionals were to share information with the aim to minimise risk by identifying a child’s needs and responding to them before they potentially escalated.
Children’s centres were ‘intended to provide a universal service for families that should ‘reflect local need’ (Barker, 2009: 82; DfES, 2006), thus creating a governance arrangement that was a hybrid of a targeted universalism within service provision; a ‘key component in the ECM agenda’ (Barker, 2009: 88). Such support was not to last, between 2010 and 2018 around 1,000 children’s centres were closed.
The third sector
Alongside the increased focus on partnership working within children’s services, Labour promoted an opening up of public services, encouraging delivery of services outside of the public sector. When Labour first came to power in 1997, they brought with them the concept of ‘the third sector’. Anthony Giddens propelled this term into public policy in his work The third way (1998). Giddens, a prominent leading British sociologist, suggested the reorganisation of views on modern society and politics (1979; 1984; 1998). The term ‘third way’ was essentially an attempt at developing a centrist platform which offered voters a potential pathway forwards from across the political spectrum as a balance between the free market economics presented by the neoliberal ideology and the social justice discourse presented from more left-wing liberal ideological frameworks. The term aimed ‘to capture a new, and broader, notion of what could and should, be the focus of political and party attention’ (Alcock, 2010: 158). Encapsulating this, a series of new institutions paved the way for the creation of the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) in 2006. The term ‘third sector’ brought with it a further redefinition and reconceptualisation of the voluntary sector. It sought to capture organisations acting within the voluntary sphere by broadening the definition to encompass the legally constituted charities, voluntary groups, faith-based charities, industrial and provident societies, social enterprises, cooperatives, community interest companies and companies limited by guarantee.
During the 1980s and 1990s, several of the threads from which Labour would build the framework for the concept of the third sector were already underway, propelled by the Conservative government. Arguably the most important of these threads was the work of an independent commission chaired by Nicholas Deakin, set up by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), who produced a report entitled ‘Meeting the challenge of change: voluntary action in the 21st century’ (Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector, 1996) commonly known as the Deakin Commission report. The Deakin Commission report mapped out a vision and principles for the voluntary sector over the following decade. However, largely perceived as reflecting the views of a team of ‘representative bodies’ and lacking in either forward thinking or critical analysis of the sector as a whole, the report was criticised as little more than a consensus document (Lewis, 1999). Although, considering the Conservative government in power at the time of its writing and with a general election on the horizon, it could have been framed as such deliberately (Kendall, 2000a). Nonetheless, the notion of partnership within the report and the suggestion of a ‘concordat’ as a mode of operationalising this partnership between the state and voluntary sector went beyond any of its predecessors, such as the Wolfenden Committee report. Kendall goes onto argue that with this mind it was more of a ‘holding document’ and its blend of ‘timidity and innovation’ could be ‘ultimately argued as successful’ and ‘dynamic in the political context’ (2000a).
Further to the establishment of a concordat the Deakin Commission report included several other recommendations which later came to fruition under Labour, including a new legal definition of charities, the establishment of taskforces to develop the concordat (later to be known as the Compact), alongside recommendations around tax issues for charities, capacity building and quality assurance. In total the report detailed 61 recommendations, with approximately half of them aimed at the government for action. Largely ignored by the Conservative government at the time, Labour welcomed these recommendations and they heavily influenced Labour thinking around the concept and politicisation of the third sector.
Therefore, for Labour the third way ‘was intended to capture a rejection of public service policy planning that relied primarily on the state (as supposedly was the case with previous Labour governments) or the market (as had been the case under the Thatcher governments of the 1980s)’ (Alcock, 2010: 163). Labour were keen to highlight a ‘newness’ in their thinking which offered a real alternative to previous administrations. Arguably, there was little real change promoting the notion of mixed state and market forces for the delivery of the most effective services possible. The promotion of the ‘third way’, with the development of the broader sector term of the ‘third sector’ created the possibility of a ‘new space for a proactive role for the sector as a tailor-made alternative to both the state and the market’ (Alcock, 2010: 164). The third sector therefore occupied a unique position, as neither state nor private sector; it