ABSTRACT
Partnership working - hitherto a fringe player in British social policy - was to be the fresh 'third way' in New Labour's approach to the public sector following the 1997 General Election, and nowhere was this more evident than in the relationship between NHS and social care services. In choosing this path, the alternative route of structural integration of separate organisations was explicitly eschewed. Yet within three years, the debate was dramatically re-opened by the proposal in The NHS Plan (DoH, 2000) to create care trusts that would combine health and social care functions in one NHS agency.
