The Welfare State After the Crisis
Since its inception, the Stockholm Network has set out to debate the way public services are provided in Europe and to argue for greater efficiency and consumer choice. Britain has experimented with aspects of market-oriented reform and with ideas from other countries but such reforms are nevertheless still viewed with suspicion. Yet a new government and a new economy makes a revolution in the way public services are provided in the UK unavoidable. No longer just the territory of think tanks, the debate about the role of the state in public services is now leading the news agenda.
This half-day seminar looked at realistic options for public service reform which will attempt to contain the impact of cuts. It offered examples from other European countries and argued that a rethink of how services are provided and what government does may be unpopular but is now the only practical way forward.
Participants were:
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Lord Freud is the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Lords) for the Department for Work and Pensions. He was appointed the shadow Minister for Welfare Reform in February 2009 and was also a member of the Economic Recovery Council advising David Cameron from February 2009 to May 2010. Between January 2008 and February 2009 he acted as adviser on welfare reform to the UK Government.
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Hans Ouwehand is director of Calder Holding, a group of companies specialising in delivering a range of services associated with welfare to work, citizenship, occupational and mental healthcare and debt counseling. Prior to moving to the private sector, Hans was the executive director of the disability department of the Dutch social security carrier UWV and responsible for the implementation of the Gatekeepers legislation and the re-assessment for the disabled population.
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Gavin Poole is the Executive Director of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). The CSJ is an independent think tank established by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2004 to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blight parts of Britain. Gavin joined the CSJ having completed 23 years of military service in the Royal Air Force where his final appointment was as a Ministerial Private Secretary within the MoD.
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Nick Timmins has been the Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times since 1996. He was a founder member of The Independent and before that he worked for The Times. He is author of The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State.
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Jason Turner served from 1998-2001 as New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s welfare commissioner. During his tenure, Turner created the largest work program in the country. Prior to his work in New York, Turner was well known as one of the chief architects of the Wisconsin welfare-to-work program.
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Helen Disney is the chief executive and founder of the Stockholm Network. Helen is formerly an editoral writer for The Times and an editorial writer and commentator for the Daily Express. From 1996-2000, she worked at the Social Market Foundation, an independent pro-market think-tank, where she was deputy director and editor of its quarterly journal.
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