Contracts, Compacts and Control: New Labour and Personal Responsibility

The 2004 report Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: The State of Knowledge and its Implications for Public Policy by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit is an attempt to draw together social science literature that explains why it is difficult for governments to influence individual citizens. Underlying this is the idea that across diverse areas of policy, state provision of services often has much less impact on outcomes than does an individual's behaviour. Therefore to improve outcomes, government needs to be able to encourage 'personal responsibility'. The authors focus mainly on the role of contracts in changing behaviour in a whole range of different areas; from ASBOs and crime prevention, to home-school agreements and education policy. This report appears to underpin much of the thinking within New Labour as to future policy, and reveals how ideas of personal responsibility are likely to be key to New Labour's manifesto commitments prior to the 2005 general election.