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Labour's thinking on social care took a surprise turn last week when a government minister advocated community organisations managing some social care services.

Public health minister Hazel Blears said that the move would offer an innovative way of delivering services, giving local people, particularly the poor, a greater say.

"A monolithic state sector that provides services in a uniform way and is unresponsive to local communities will surrender its popularity and will increasingly be disconnected, undervalued and open to criticism," Blears told a London conference organised by Progress, a Labour modernisers' think-tank. "There is a need for neighbourhood management and neighbourhood ownership."

She said community enterprises and businesses were starting to develop "where there is a need for trust and a suspicion of the profit motive", and that these had particular relevance in residential and child care and health and well-being. She saw primary care trusts as a means of building "community capacity".

She added: "The kind of management I am talking about applies more to social care than traditional medical services - it is what social care should be all about."

At the same conference former Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson said that agencies like Sure Start were showing "not what the state can do for the citizen but what the citizen can do for his or her own neighbourhood or community".