ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what saving and modernising the National Health Service (NHS) meant in practice during Labour’s first three years in office. The belief in nationalisation, central planning and technocratic paternalism, which had provided the context and the rationale for the creation of the NHS in 1948, had been abandoned, even while the party remained committed to the NHS. The chapter examines aspects of the Blair Government’s first three years in office most relevant to understanding the context in which policies for the NHS were developed. Equally important, particularly for placing the NHS in the wider context of New Labour’s style of administration, were a battery of initiatives designed to ‘modernise’ Government. In the case of the NHS the result was to set off an avalanche of target-setting. Devising a strategy for the NHS posed some peculiar problems for New Labour in government.
