Opinion: Tom Gash loves the idea of choice in services – but not the ‘right to choose’

The government’s suggestion last month that it could create a ‘right to choose’ between service providers – made in its Open Public Services 2012 document – may provide a valuable signal that it is committed to increasing individuals’ power to choose between providers.


By Civil Service World

12 Apr 2012

However, the right is likely to prove unworkable. To make it legally enforceable, government would need to specify precisely the degree and type of choice to be provided. Do I have a choice of schools, for example, if the second nearest school is 30 miles away? Can I choose my meals-on-wheels provider? And what if the local authority is already locked into a five-year contract with a single provider? Specifying what constitutes fair choice is likely to be time-consuming and may end up producing exactly the kind of bureaucracy that the government is seeking to avoid.

Instead, government should focus on the major choice-based reforms already underway – including those in schools, universities, health and social care – and make sure they lead to the best possible services. This will require new ways of working in Whitehall.

Departments will no longer tightly direct services but instead act as stewards of a diverse and complex system of service provision, where individual choices increasingly shape who provides public services and how. Civil servants will have to work far more collaboratively, including with service users – ensuring that their ways of exercising choice will improve standards and punish poor providers. And they will have to work increasingly closely with service providers (often private sector), who will often have the clearest insights into how reforms will work in practice.

Ministers, meanwhile, will need to be comfortable with some of the political consequences of introducing choice-based systems. If money follows individual choices, certain schools or hospitals will have to close when they cannot attract sufficient numbers – not just when they’re under-performing but also for structural reasons, such as being located in an area of low demand. This could be politically uncomfortable, but bail-outs would undermine the very logic on which the coalition’s reform programme is based: that making providers compete to attract users will force everyone to up their game. ?

Tom Gash, programme director, Institute for Government

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