Since 1980, the British state as an employer has changed in complex and contradictory ways. In the context of increasing difficulties with private capital accumulation, growing trade union militancy in the state sector and a shift in government ideology, governments began to impose more stringent financial regimes on state services and to restructure the control of the work process. These changes involved the recomposition of public sector managements with the emergence of the practice of ‘new public management’ (NPM). Of increasing importance, the structure and organisation of the public sector has been recomposed, the boundaries of the public services were redrawn, via privatisation policies, and public service provision has been reorganised so that combinations of public and private institutions increasingly provide these services. The result is a de-centred state, where institutional unity and universal provision have been replaced by institutional fragmentation and uneven provision, according to various and varied criteria.