In May 1997, New Labour came into power with a strong policy focus on early years and youth interventions. New Labour inherited a society beset with inequality, crime and poverty, and in which, for example, one in five families had no members engaged in the labour market, and promised to tackle: under-investment in schooling and the NHS; fractured communities; crime and anti-social behaviour; un-/under-employment; and social exclusion, with flagship policies related to education, early-years investments, youth justice, families and welfare. Accordingly, their focus was on reinvesting in some of the communities which had seen the greatest levels of poverty and exclusion since the early-1980s. These proposals were a highly radical policy departure, and saw the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit, Sure Start initiatives, a series of ‘New Deals’ for specific impoverished communities. Large investments were made in the lives of young people and children, given the potential long-term ‘pay backs’ which could be expected. Most of these schemes were later abandoned or severely curtailed after Labour left office. As such, the New Labour era stands in contrast to the periods of welfare retrenchment which came either before or after it and is worthy of further study given the likelihood of an incoming Labour administration and the scale of reinvestments currently needed.

We approach the New Labour era as having its own distinct ‘policy portfolio’; one which revolved around communitarianism, social inclusion and opportunity, and was aimed at affecting the early years and subsequent life-courses of a cohort of young people, with the hope that these investments would reap social and economic benefits for them and the country in subsequent years. Our approach builds on studies of the impact of Thatcherite social and economic policies on those born in the late-1950s and early-1970s (Farrall et al 2019, 2020a & b, Gray et al 2022). Now, as the children born in the 1990s and early-2000s enter their 20s and 30s, and as data of sufficient quality, quantity and duration emerges, we seek to explore New Labour’s impact on the attitudes, lives and life-courses of those who grew up during their period in office. Using state of the art quantitative data analyses techniques we will assess the impact of the Labour Party’s longest ever period in office on those who born between 1990 and 2002.   

Whilst there have been many assessments of the impact of New Labour (Powell 2008, Toynbee and Walker 2005, Selsdon 2007, Hills et al 2009), many of these took place either during the period under question, or immediately after Blair left office in 2007, with the exception of the Taylor Review (2016). As Walthery et al (2015) note, few examinations have relied on individual-level data. As such, the longer-term effects of New Labour’s period in office on the lives and life-courses of the cohort of young people who were specifically targeted has not been fully studied. We will locate and understand New Labour’s approach to welfare, education, crime, the criminal justice system and punishment within the wider changes which affected Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. Accordingly, we will keep in mind the roles played by earlier social and economic policies, prior changes to the criminal justice system and fluctuations in public attitudes to crime and punishment. Our objective is to explore the ways in which a government’s broad social and economic agenda can shape the subsequent life-courses of those who grew up during its period in office. We will achieve this via the use of state-of-the-art quantitative data analyses techniques which we have perfected whilst studying the impact of ‘Thatcherite’ social and economic policies in the immediately prior political era (namely, structural equation modelling).  

Because the cohorts we will analyse (the 1970, Next Steps and Millenium Cohort studies) were born many years apart from one another (respectively, 1970, 1989/90 and 2000-02) such analyses of the shifts in attitudes and behaviours can be made to appear more abrupt than, in fact, they were. We will therefore contextualize the cohort analyses by undertaking Age, Period & Cohort analyses. This will involve adding to the dataset we archived at the UKDA (SN7875) new data from annual surveys since 2013 for the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Crime Survey for England & Wales. This approach, which is borne out of Mannheim’s theory of generations (1928), encourages us to examine groups of people who share an age location in history. Similarly, in order to ensure that we also examine wider, national-level trajectories against which lives and life-courses are played out, we will combine the above with time series analyses. These analyses will involve modelling the relationships between the economy, social attitudes and features of the criminal justice system (such as imprisonment rates, punitive attitudes, fear of crime, perceptions of anti-social behaviour, crime rates - both Police and self-reported data - and expenditure). This will be based on both officially recorded data and data from the Crime Survey for England & Wales and the British Social Attitudes Survey. By complementing the cohort analyses in these ways, we will be able to locate their experiences in wider attitudinal, behavioral and national changes over time, enabling us to assess the extent to which national- and individual-level path dependencies and life-courses interact. This approach, combining repeated longitudinal cohort studies and Age, Period & Cohort analyses will allow us to develop an understanding of political, social and economic change and its interaction with birth cohorts and individual life-courses (Neil and Sampson, 2021).

We focus on crime and welfare for a number of reasons. Firstly, crime was a highly prominent aspect of New Labour’s policy agenda. Secondly, crime is also an example of some of the interconnecting and intersecting areas of New Labour thought and effort, as well as some of its most acute dilemmas. Furthermore, crime is shaped and driven by other social processes (relating to employment, family life, welfare systems, education policies and ‘opportunity’), which were key policy targets for New Labour. As such, New Labour’s welfare policies may have had impacts on individuals’ engagement in crime several years ‘down-stream’ (in ways similar to those charted for the Thatcher era, e.g. Gray et al 2022). Finally, since we have documented to a very high degree the impact on crime and the criminal justice the welfare, social and economic policies associated with the Thatcher and Major administrations, we will be able to throw further light on the extent to which macro-level policy regimes are associated with fluctuations in crime rates and punitiveness. We will interview around 20 policy-makers and politicians involved in the New Labour era. We will support our analyses of these data with analyses of the British Social Attitudes surveys (1983-present) to locate each cohort in a wider process of social change.

Because so much of our focus will be on crime and the criminal justice system, from the outset of the project, we will partner with the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies (CCJS), with whom we will write and publish a synthesis of our main research findings to be published in hard and online versions towards the end of the project. Clearly, if there are lessons to be learnt about how the New Labour era altered the life-courses of children born in the 1990s and early-2000s such that they did not offend, then the policies associated with that era may offer hopes for future policies will reduce the total costs of the criminal justice system. Again, drawing on the CCJS’ extensive network of policy, academic, think tank and journalistic contacts with we ensure that the report is given a wide-airing, thereby increasing the chance of it gaining media attention.

Justice Futures (comprising Anita Dockley, former research director at the Howard League for Penal Reform and Gemma Buckland, director of Do It Justice and former advisor to the House of Commons Justice Committee. They will use systems approaches to work with stakeholders to develop an understanding of the complexity, blockages and opportunities across the various systems (social and criminal justice policy areas) during the Blair Government. We will co-produce research tools for use in the expert interviews and a focus group. Following the interviews and quantitative analyses, JF and the research team would work together to map the processes at operation during the Blair social policy era. JF would produce a systems analysis which would inform an understanding of the Blair Government’s approaches and provide insights for future policy and practice development.