Social Policy, Social Welfare and Scandal : How British Public Policy is Made

This text explores the complex relationship between public policy and scandal. It describes the process whereby scandals are constructed and pursued, and demonstrates how scandals coincide with key shifts in public policy, in ways that are more complex and reciprocal than might first appear.

Scandals do not just happen. They are made. They are constructed out of such everyday tragedies as the small carelessnesses and institutional brutality of the long stay hospital, the abuse of children or the violent deaths of innocent bystanders. This book, by examining the landmark scandals of the postwar period, reveals how scandals are generated, to what purposes they are used and whose interests they are made to serve.

In particular, it examines the role of the public inquiry, an increasingly familiar policy device in the process whereby the story of a particular scandal is told and its meaning fixed. Using transcripts, press coverage, materials from the Public ecord Office and other contemporary sources, each of the scandals described in the book is located in its own historical and policy context in order to explore the complex cause and effect relationship between public policy and scandal.