The individual learning account experiment in the UK: A conjunctural crisis?

Individual learning accounts (ILAs) were a flagship policy of the 1997 Labour Government in the UK. ILAs provided a new universal right for all adults to receive State financial support to pursue lifelong learning that was delivered through markets in ways consistent with the prevailing neo-liberal hegemony. The scheme was suspended following allegations of fraud and abandoned after regulators of markets associated with the neo-liberal hegemony published reports. An analysis of these reports is used to highlight how they failed to emphasise the positive and novel universal right of financial support from ILAs, but instead criticised the adoption of light-touch accounting controls and gave these as a reason for fraud being possible and over-expenditure. Subsequently, when a replacement scheme was introduced, the novel principle of universal financial support was abandoned. Gramsci's concept of a conjunctural crisis is used to explain the abandonment of the novel element of ILAs while the neo-liberal hegemony endured.