The modern missionaries: (or how choice and market forces are being imposed on consumers).
| Author | McAteer, Mick |
| Position | Features |
This article provides a personal view on the implications of the government's choice agenda (1) and draws heavily from the major programme of work the policy team at Which? undertook on choice. (2) Which? used its experience of traditional consumer sectors as 'benchmarks', and its knowledge of consumer and producer behaviour, to assess the likely impact on those sectors which are seeing the introduction of choice for the first time. Few organisations have anywhere near the same degree of independence or experience (3) of covering such a wide range of consumer policy issues. (4) The consumer perspective had been missing so far from the debate about choice so the Which? choice programme focused on what consumers actually want when it comes to core welfare or public goods.
Although choice is a hot political issue of the moment, it is one of a number of ideological or concept-based policy initiatives which have emerged over the past two decades--for example, co-production, double devolution, the new localism and so on. Many of these concept-based policy ideas are harmless or without substance and are of interest mainly to academics and those in think-tanks.
However, the choice agenda is much more dangerous and is part of a market ideology which encompasses: the privatisation of public services; liberalisation and deregulation of consumer markets; the large-scale transfer of risk and responsibility for meeting core welfare needs such as retirement, health and social care, and education away from the state and other intermediaries (such as employers) to individuals; and a general undermining of collective provision as a way of meeting consumers' basic needs.
There are striking similarities between the choice agenda and previous initiatives: they were not just economic agents of change but a defining philosophy for the government of the time. For example, personal pensions were trumpeted as a way of liberating employees from the 'shackles' of paternalistic employers' pension schemes (even the images used to promote liberalisation are similar).
Market provision is intrinsically different from collective provision. The current pension crisis provides a striking lesson about what can go wrong if dogma is allowed to override objectivity. Thankfully, in this case the limitations of the open market model, and the advantages of the collective approach, has been recognised through the government's acceptance of the need for a national pension scheme--even if it took nearly twenty years to recognise this at significant cost to current and future generations of citizens. It would be a great shame if we had to rebuild other public services because of ideology.
I should stress that this is definitely not an attack on markets. Efficient markets are marvellous things to behold. Choice can foster competition and innovation, and makes producers responsive to consumers' needs. No-one can argue with the desire to make public services more efficient and responsive to the needs of the nation; to break the stranglehold of vested professional interests in the public sector, who often seem to forget that they are there to serve the public interest; to introduce effective management; and to remove bureaucracy and regulation that genuinely inhibits innovation and efficiency. Nor is it contradictory to the public service ethos to introduce the operational efficiencies that exist in the best of the large private sector organisations.
However, the key question is whether allowing people choice and letting market forces determine material wealth is the best way to produce the outcomes we want as consumers and taxpayers or will it lead to more unfairness, and greater inefficiency in our valued public services? My concern is that the limitations and appropriateness of market solutions for meeting core welfare needs or the long term consequences of reforms have not been evaluated objectively because of market ideology.
Of course, the scale of the risks and detriment all depends on the degree to which choice and market forces are extended into public services. It may well be that choice is not taken up by large numbers of consumers. However, we need to be wary of economic determinism and policy creep where market model becomes the natural or default state. Moreover, market forces will undoubtedly introduce conflicts of interest and cause providers to behave differently. Consumer sovereignty which acts as a check and balance on providers in traditional consumer markets does not exist to anywhere near the same degree when it comes to complex core welfare needs--this must increase the risk of consumer detriment occurring.
One of the main reasons the choice ideologues have gained so much ground in the debate is that the pragmatists have been afraid to air their concerns robustly (and failed to find a language to communicate those concerns) because of the fear of sounding patronising. After all, who could argue with the idea of more choice or that all consumers shouldn't have the right to take advantage of equality of opportunities provided by liberalisation?
This is unfortunate. At the most basic level, markets are amoral and allocate resources and value according to economic power and influence, not needs or rights. There is a significant difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. Power in the market does not necessarily have to take the form of monetary power. It can relate to consumer capacity to exert influence on markets via other means such as higher standards of literacy, ability to assimilate and use information, consumer confidence in dealing with markets, and so on. These factors replace disposable income as the market currency. The fact that services remain free at the point of delivery in core areas provides limited protection to vulnerable consumers. It is disingenuous to argue that everyone should have the right to participate in an open-market system or that it is patronising to want to 'protect' vulnerable consumers from the consequences of market forces.
Even though this generation of UK citizens has lived through a relatively benign economic period there is a sense of anxiety and uncertainty among consumers about choice and a sense of powerlessness in the face of market forces and globalisation. Far from actively welcoming the possibility of...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
