The Barriers to Choice Review: How are people using choice in public services?
This review was set up to answer the question: how do people use the choices they have been given in public services? In particular: how much are these choices used and valued by the most disadvantaged? The review included a call for evidence, a series of round tables around England, a literature review and an extensive survey by Ipsos MORI, the headline findings of which concluded that: Somewhere around half the population are currently choosing, but the difficulties vary between different services. There is strong public support for being able to choose, but still around a third of the population find it difficult. People are generally happy with their service once they get it, even if they had no choice. The biggest barriers are a combination of access and information.
Three repeated themes emerged from the round tables, which gave rise to the following questions which this report proposes to answer
- How can the system give more power to service users, and especially disadvantaged groups, given that they are less comfortable about exercising choice, more frustrated by bureaucratic barriers and more affected by other difficulties like transport? There are a range of barriers before people exercising choice which are peculiar to particular services. But there is often an underlying problem, which is that the rhetoric of choice is overlaid across the original system that drives public services – the old systems and financial machinery – which are still in place. Wherever people‟s right to choice is in any way ambiguous, those systems can tend to take over and deny them what they want, which makes difficulties for less confident or otherwise disadvantaged people.
- How can disadvantaged groups navigate the choices before them, when they don‟t use the internet and are often more bewildered by choices? Access to information, especially in social care, but also across the major public services, is a major problem for disadvantaged people, especially if they do not have access to the internet. This is not just a problem of basic information, but a problem about a lack of signposting and interpretation of that information, which needs to be addressed if people are going to exercise choice more broadly.
- How can we align people’s expectations with the reality of choice, by making services responsive and flexible enough to support disadvantaged people in a more confident use of choice? There is often a gap between what people expect choice to mean for them and what it actually means in practice. The difficulty is that the kind of flexibility in the services that people want, and are increasingly demanding, is also a pre-requisite for many people to exercise any choice at all.
Published : 24th January 2013
Publisher : Cabinet Office [ More From This Publisher ]
Rights : Crown Copyright
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