Why do public services get increasingly expensive yet often decreasingly effective?
Boyle explores how the ideas of co-production, developed in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, have been brought into the debate in Britain. He explains what happened when the National Health Service began using these processes, and looks to the future – and whether co-production might provide a clue to the Holy Grail of welfare reform: services that are able to reach upstream and tackle causes, rather than just waiting to deal with symptoms. Boyle is a fellow at the New Economics Foundation, the pioneering think-tank in London, and has been at the heart of the effort to develop co-production in Britain as a critical element of public service reform.
