ABSTRACT
It would be misleading to suggest that the incoming Labour Government of 1997 had any specific plans relating to the development of health care chaplaincy. However, it has been noted that the new administration ‘placed much greater emphasis than any predecessor Government in the modern era on religion, widely defined, as a form of social capital and on the role of faith communities’.1 In the case of chaplaincy this requires a careful analysis to establish whether, and to what extent, the advent of New Labour stimulated change in chaplaincy. It is more likely that as the paymaster for chaplaincy, New Labour’s Department of Health had an implicit influence on both the content and the form of appeals for funding and development. In this chapter attention will be given to the exponential growth in activity which characterized chaplaincy under the first 10 years of New Labour. Contrasted with a history in which the Department of Health seemed largely oblivious to the existence of chaplains, the years crossing the millennium offer a fascinating testimony to a belief in the power of the centre to engineer change even at the peripheries of the health service. New Labour’s mantra of modernization – backed by the unprecedented election mandate of 1997 – ensured that change was swift and deep. Utilizing greater patient involvement as a moral counterbalance to the power of the professions New Labour opted for a pragmatic use of public and private capacity in order to provide ‘a tax-funded, universal service offering comprehensive care in the pursuit of equity and social solidarity’.2 The Government defined the framework for the regulated market that would deliver reform and improvement. If nothing else, this process of change witnessed ‘wave after wave of policy documents and guidance’ in the process of which ‘new NHS agencies were born and died’.3
