Personalisation constitutes an intriguing topic for anyone interested in public policy: a new policy idea that has rapidly captured the interest of people across the political spectrum and looks likely to be the stimulus for major welfare state reform. This creates a research challenge to identify what is meant by personalisation and what its likely impacts will be. Personalisation does not seem to be coherent or wide-ranging enough to constitute an ideology or indeed a philosophy (despite sometimes being described in those terms), nor is it a broad buzzword in public policy like community and responsibility. It is not a category that bestows roles and identities like citizenship or consumerism. However, it is more than a specific policy programme, like the New Deal for welfare or Sure Start for children and families. Personalisation is best understood as a narrative of public service reform, endorsing a set of relationships and policy goals in a way that is compelling and emotionally resonant, but also multi-interpretable. As it has emerged within social care, and been stretched into other policy sectors, it has been translated into different forms, themselves fluid and contested.

Four themes are looked at in detail in this final chapter. First, the chapter revisits the meaning of personalisation and assesses how far it can be understood as a stable and portable term within public policy. The second section examines the likely policy challenges for personalisation in the future, focusing on social care, where the practical implications are currently most evident. The third section considers the future for personalisation as a system-wide approach to welfare reform, relevant to a range of new initiatives, including personal health budgets and the broader principle of a conditional welfare entitlement. The final section examines the scope for a ‘progressive’ personalisation, and whether there are nodes in the debate where pressure can be focused to ensure that equity and social justice are valued in the race to personalise.

Assembling personalisation

As the discussions in the previous chapters have indicated, personalisation is not something to be discovered or solved. It is in flux, making it difficult to identify a stable core. Hartley (2007, p 639) reflects on this uncertainty: ‘At this juncture, it is difficult to discern whether or not personalisation constitutes the passage of the existing code to a new one, or whether it is simply a bewildering mix – the amorphous shape of things to come.’