Harnessing Social Enterprise for Local Public Services

Is social enterprise the way forward for public services?

Social enterprises are organisations set up to deliver public benefit rather than private profit, and are often owned by their staff. Their social and environmental focus makes them ideal for providing flexible and responsive health and social care. This article explains how social enterprises differ from other types of businesses and from public bodies. It explains the policy context and benef...

Harnessing Employee Engagement in UK Public Services

Migration and Local Public Services

Using unique Swedish micro data we examine the impact of local public services on community choice. The choice of community is modeled as a choice between a discrete set of alternatives. The US literature has produced conflicting evidence with respect to the importance of local public services. We find a robust positive (negative) relationship between local public services (local income tax rat...

Adapting Public Sector Services to Local Delivery

This article describes the local government system established in the 2001 Devolution Plan and its evolution over the period 2002-07, with a focus on two essential public services, education and health. We believe that the devolution of service delivery functions, delegation of financial powers, decentralization of authority, and deconcentration of executive powers, can, together, lead to bette...

Harnessing the Potential to Quantify Public Preferences for Healthcare Priorities through Citizens’ Juries

Despite progress towards greater public engagement, questions about the optimal approach to access public preferences remain unanswered. We review two increasingly popular methods for engaging the public in healthcare priority-setting and determining their preferences; the Citizens’ Jury (CJ) and Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). We discuss the theoretical framework from which each method is de...