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How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand has just completed a period as policy advisor working within the British government at the highest levels

AbstractBehavioural public policy analysts have examined cases of individuals' failures of reason or judgement to attain their ends and have used these to justify 'means' paternalism: a form of government intervention that tries to save individuals from the consequences of those reasoning failures and to enable them better to achieve those ends. This has been challenged on a number of grounds, including too great a focus on choice-preserving interventions such as nudges, the privileging of future preferences over current ones and the possibility of state failures as damaging to individual well-being as the original reasoning failure. This paper summarizes the principal arguments in favour of means paternalism and then addresses these challenges.

In recent years there have been several proposals from academics, think tanks, and politicians for a universal grant of basic capital (UBC) to be awarded to every citizen. There has been one UBC programme that was actually implemented: the British Child Trust Fund, started in 2003 by a Labour Government and abolished by a Coalition Government in 2011. This paper discusses the case for a UBC, focusing attention on its potential for helping young people to attain long-term positive outcomes in several dimensions of life, from employment to health. By looking at the experience of the Child Trust Fund, the paper also highlights lessons for how a UBC should be implemented in practice. It proposes a Citizen's Day: a coming-of-age occasion, marked by a ceremony at which a substantial UBC is awarded, along with the right to vote.

In recent years there have been several proposals from academics, think tanks, and politicians for a universal grant of basic capital (UBC) to be awarded to every citizen. There has been one UBC programme that was actually implemented: the British Child Trust Fund, started in 2003 by a Labour Government and abolished by a Coalition Government in 2011. This paper discusses the case for a UBC, focusing attention on its potential for helping young people to attain long-term positive outcomes in several dimensions of life, from employment to health. By looking at the experience of the Child Trust Fund, the paper also highlights lessons for how a UBC should be implemented in practice. It proposes a Citizen's Day: a coming-of-age occasion, marked by a ceremony at which a substantial UBC is awarded, along with the right to vote. JEL Number: I 13

Economists and others have used the results from behavioral economics to justify paternalistic government policies, aimed at changing an individual's behavior in the present so as to improve that individual's well-being in the future. Examples include the automatic enrollment in pension schemes and anti-smoking measures, such as banning smoking in public places or proposals for a smoking license. But these - and the economic analyses underlying them – have been challenged on the grounds that they arbitrarily privilege one set of preferences over another. The privileged preferences include those of an 'inner rational agent' and those of the future over the present. This paper addresses this criticism and puts forward two new conceptions of - and justifications for – these kinds of policy.

The politics of choice and competition in public services are complex. Only public service users seem basically to want choice. Providers prefer alternative models of service delivery especially those that rely upon trust. Social democrats prefer voice and trust; conservatives want choice and competition to be exercised in the context of a full private market. Yet, so long as they are properly designed, policies aimed at promoting choice and competition can serve the interests of all these groups better than the alternatives.