Giving consumers of British public services more choice: what can be learned from recent history?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in the autumn of 2001 that he wanted to extend individual consumer choice in the public services (Blair, 2001). What do we know from recent experience about the conditions under which such policies can be sustained? In this article, the experience of individual consumer choice over the last ten, and in some cases, fifteen years, is compared across nine fields of British public services. The article identifies the policy goals for introducing choice, considers how far they were typically achieved, and identifies problems and unintended side-effects, including distributional problems, inefficiencies and one type of political risk. This provisional evaluation is based on a widely ranging review of literature spanning several disciplines. The principal products of the argument are two detailed tables, setting out, respectively, the degree to which the goals seem to have been achieved for each choice programme, as far as the available literature can tell us, and how far distributional, efficiency and political risk problems have dogged consumer choice in each field. In the discussion section, trends and variations are summarised. Finally, some lessons are drawn from the comparisons, for policy makers who may be considering the further extension of consumer choice in public services

Can policy making be evidence-based?

Ministers are always calling for more evidence-based interventions. Do they apply the same criterion to their own work of making policy? Perhaps surprisingly, policy making is not an evidence-free zone. However, it is important to understand the ways in which policy makers in different situations will use information differently, count different kinds of information as evidence, and so exercise different styles of judgment

It's America, where you stand up to be accountable

This is an extract from The next phase: rewiring local decision making for political judgement, published by the New Local Government Network

Volunteering for all? Explaining patterns of volunteering and identifying strategies to promote it

In policy terms in the UK, as elsewhere, volunteering has become increasingly associated with training for the workplace; a view which offers little to individuals ‘beyond’ the labour market because of age, disability or care commitments. Applying a neo-Durkheimian framework to a study of volunteers we examine how far the patterns of volunteering can be explained by the underlying institutional factors of strong and weak social regulation and social integration. This framework can offer insights into a range of possible policy levers for individuals rather than a ‘one size fits all’ emphasis on volunteering for personal gain for the workplace

Pi pi scattering lengths at O(p^6) revisited

This article completes a former work where part of the O(p^6) low-energy constants entering in the pi pi scattering were estimated. Some resonance contributions were missed in former calculations and slight differences appeared with respect to our outcome. Here, we provide the full results for all the contributing O(p^6) couplings. We also perform a reanalysis of the hadronic inputs used for the estimation (resonance masses, widths...). Their reliability was checked together with the impact of the input uncertainties on the determinations of the chiral couplings and the scattering lengths a^I_J. Our outcome is found in agreement with former works though with slightly larger errors. However, the effect in the final values of the a^I_J is negligible after combining them with the other uncertainties. Based on this consistency, we conclude that the previous scattering length determinations seem to be rather solid and reliable, with the cO(p^6) low-energy constants quite under control. Nevertheless, the uncertainties found in the present work point out the limitation on further improvements unless the precision of the O(p^6) couplings is properly increased.Comment: 19 pages. Improved treatment of the a0 decay width and update of the numerical outcomes. Final version published in Phys. Rev. D (10.1103/PhysRevD.79.096006