In the aftermath of its second successive electoral defeat in 2015 and the return of the first majority Conservative government since 1997, there is fresh space in which to reflect on the social policy and governance legacies of New Labour. In this act of reflection two things are striking. Most obvious is the fragility of a social policy architecture that just a few years ago might have been described as approximating a ‘settlement’. Tax credits, urban policies, Sure Start centres and the rest have all but been kicked away by an austerity ideology which Labour has, perversely, failed to rebut. Another more pertinent point here is just how technocratic it all was; the initiativitis, the task forces and the ‘czars’. This is not news of course, but as state-driven social projects are rolled back and social democratic parties struggle to formulate coherent agendas post-Recession, there is an urgent need to understand what is worth defending, protecting and perhaps repeating. However, making such judgements is not easy. Looking back at all that frenetic ‘modernisation’, it is very difficult to assess which bits ‘worked’ in any meaningful way. This is ironic given the New Labour obsession with answering exactly this question. This is one of many New Labour paradoxes. Ministers, departments and research arms, often in UK academia, constructed edifice after edifice of measurement, evidence and evaluation about its reforms and yet, a few years on, one struggles to detect the resonances beyond those narrow horizons.

In this book, by Helen Dickinson, an analytical approach is offered which might help. The overarching focus of the book is ‘governance’ and its attendant partnership, collaborative and network relations. Early nerves about this contested terrain are settled as Dickinson offers an astute and accessible first chapter overview, steering the reader through some potentially choppy early waters. By the end of the chapter three, with the aid of handy tables and summaries, the reader has a firm grasp of relevant governance debates and how they apply to the New Labour era, with particular attention being paid to how New Labour mobilized the idea of ‘partnership’ as a means of devising and implementing policy. Taking on this specific theme, the author, thankfully, does not try to ‘reach a conclusion about the extent to which partnerships did or did not work under New Labour’, preferring instead to provide a ‘more nuanced account of the realities of collaborative working’. She does this with regard to three much-discussed areas of the welfare state during the New Labour era: child safeguarding, urban regeneration and health and social care. Dickinson's method, informed by the work of Jon McKenzie and influenced by interpretive and decentred governance approaches, is one which seeks to offer richer criteria for evaluating partnerships. Inspired by the idea of multi-lateral ‘performances’ of partnership, she seeks to move beyond organizational and technological audits of performance and include cultural readings. This is done to take account of the ‘agency, values, emotions and practices’ enacted and reproduced in performing ‘partnership’. Whilst the book does provide something (from the perspective of 2015) of a jarring reminder of the technocratic machinations of the New Labour years, in adopting this approach Dickinson offers an under-examined and potentially fresh take.

As we move into the meat of the book, where the author applies her analytical framework to the three case studies, the reader is given a detailed account of both policy background and a discussion of the relevant partnerships. Dickinson draws on the academic evidence to try and reach a view about whether partnerships in each domain ‘worked’. Unsurprisingly, she finds a series of inconclusive endpoints. Nonetheless, students and those wanting a refresher on New Labour history will find much in these chapters both in terms of policy detail and in terms of shining a light on the meagre evidence base. The inclusion of a ‘cultural efficacy’ framework ensures that each of these chapters takes account of relevant discourses, metaphors, selfhoods and reflexivities pertaining to partnerships and is not content to stick on the banalised territory of organizational and technological impacts. Whilst I was not wholly convinced by the rather schematic approach to analysis or the implications of the conclusions reached, the inclusion of a cultural dimension offered, for me, a way of reinvigorating what is often stale evaluative terrain.

At the beginning of the book, Dickinson suggests that the New Labour governments from 1997–2010 had ‘very noble’ intentions and attempted to ‘fundamentally revolutionise governance of the UK’. Leaving aside the knotty question of ‘intent’, this book offers a striking reminder of what was indeed a far-reaching, industrious and chaotic period in British social policy and administration. The book serves this reminder by delving into the New Labour playbook and pulling out ‘partnerships’ as a focus and subjecting it to sober and thorough analysis. Overall, the author finds that whilst New Labour tried, most of its partnership reforms failed to deliver more than modest improvements in results or impacts. However, far from being a trenchant critique of this ‘failure’, the book prefers to use it to make a more important point about the painfully narrow basis on which the performance of partnerships, and governance more broadly, was and is measured. Only time will tell if the next incarnation of public sector architects is able to move beyond this managerialist horizon, or if the whole notion of public sector architecture has any validity at all.