Response to Hunter, Dixon and Saltman

Each of these respondents has raised a number of interesting issues, to which it is impossible to do justice in the space I have here. But here are a few brief comments. Jennifer Dixon draws attention to what she considers to be an absence of evidence to support competition and choice. But, rightly, she also directs this criticism at the advocates of the other models of public service delivery, especially the model based on trust, where the quality of the delivery depends on the good-will or ‘knightliness’ of the providers. In fact I believe this trust model is more vulnerable to that charge than models involving choice and competition. This is particularly relevant when we consider some of David Hunter’s points. Hunter does little to address the central arguments that, generally, competition and choice will promote quality, efficiency, equity and responsiveness better than the alternative models for public services, preferring to rely upon quotes from other authors that the ideas themselves are ‘zombies’ and that only ‘dunces’ would believe such arguments. He does put forward an alternative model himself – ‘co-production’ – but we only get one paragraph on it. This looks as though it is based on trust of some kind, but it is difficult to tell since we are given so little detail. We need to know exactly how this model would be different from the other non-choice models and, more specifically, how it would avoid the pitfalls of waste, inefficiency and middle class privileging that accompany them.