Conclusion

This chapter brings together the main themes of the volume. It argues that deinstitutionalisation and community care should be understood as distinct policies – one should follow on from the other, but this has not happened. These policies which have been adopted across the globe were driven by a combination of fiscal conservatism and progressive idealism. Fiscal conservatism was, for most of the period, the dominant force. Community care has become discredited, but it can be reinvigorated by a call to the progressive idealism that underpinned it.