ABSTRACT
Community care as a social policy is relatively new in Britain. This chapter explores the nature of the developments in community care and the shift in approach to the delivery of social services. It traces the history and the formulation of government policy on community care and assesses the key objectives of the 1989 White Paper. The chapter illustrates some of the more pressing issues of implementing the new policy on community care, by drawing on the work of two research projects designed to monitor the process of change. The process of assessing need thus encapsulates the tension between choice and rationing. The history of the policy of community care is a vexed one: it has been suggested that the term's "durability probably owes much to its manipulation to encompass the widest possible range of institutions". The White Paper's "independence" objective also assumed implicitly that it is possible to keep people out of institutional care.
