Despite talk of ‘privatization’ and ‘secularization’ in post-war Britain, the residual resources of faith groups preserved them as public actors, even when the welfare state was at its greatest extent. As a ‘market’ ideology came to challenge a ‘statist’ one, it was possible to justify the continuing role of religion in both welfare and education in terms of a ‘free market’ in both spheres which makes the most of the financial and human ‘capital’ which ‘faith-based providers’ can supply. The effect has been to move welfare and education from partly or predominantly faith-based philanthropic enterprises before 1945, through a period of statism afterwards, and then from the 1980s back out to a plurality of providers again, which explicitly includes religious groups once more, though in a greater mix of ‘competition’. This is not to say that faith-based provision ceased in the period after 1945 but that it was in some sense nationalized before being set back within a much more mixed context once again after 1979.