Evaluating Labour'S Market Reforms, 2002-10

Abstract

Starting in 2002, the UK Labour government of 1997-2010 introduced a series of changes to the National Health Service (NHS) in England designed to increase individual NHS patient choice of place of elective hospital care and competition among public and private providers of elective hospital services for NHS-funded patients. In 2006, the Department of Health initiated the Health Reform Evaluation Programme (HREP) to assess the impact of the changes. The changes broadly had the effects that proponents had predicted but the effects were mostly modest. Most of the undesirable impacts feared by critics appeared not to have materialized to any discernible extent, at least by early in 2010. Labour's market appeared to have generated stronger incentives for quality and efficiency than its 1990s predecessor with no obvious detriment to equity of access. However, this high level conclusion conceals a far more nuanced and complex picture of both the process of implementation and the impact of the changes, as the papers in this supplement drawn from the HREP show.