This collection of essays explores the question – how should we think about ‘the consumer’ of public services? It also examines the idea and the reality of choice in a range of English social services – notably health, housing, social care and education.

Some contributors draw on work they undertook as part of the ESRC programme of research on the ‘Cultures of Consumption’. Others draw on wider literature to chart the rise of choice as a mechanism that was intended, in part, to redress the balance of power between the consumers and producers of public services. The focus is mostly on the period from the late 1980s though the Blair years.

The authors’ collective answer is that there is no such thing as ‘the’ consumer who is, or ought to be, king. Public service users exercise limited choice, feel themselves more or less empowered, use information more or less well, depending on the service, the social context and their social position. Moreover, there is always a distributional moral issue to be faced in public service delivery unlike the private sector. Public services have to be, or should be, driven by equity concerns. We cannot let the crude consequences of choice lie where they fall. Public policy has been insufficiently attuned to these complexities and would have been more effective and fair if it had been.

The evidence drawn upon derives from a range of research methods. There are interviews with policy advisors and a careful analysis of policy documents to disentangle their ‘policy narratives’. Chapters include the results of in-depth interviews with users to see how far they think of themselves as ‘consumers’ or have any notion of being able to exercise choice. Others explore the impact of new information technology to judge how far this has empowered users. Then the authors look at the way these factors play out in different services and how far public policy has actually gone in extending what kind of choice, and to whom, in each of the service areas discussed. It turns out that the extension of choice has been pretty minimal. Parents, for example, have been given only highly constrained choices over schools. There has been limited ‘new entry’ into the education market by new providers and parents have had less choice over the curriculum within schools. The contributions are thoughtfully summarised and discussed in the final chapter by the editors.

This is a useful read then, balanced and informative. I would have liked a bit more on the history of ideas covering a longer time period. Choice has been around as an issue for far longer than the late 1980s. I was pleased to see the editors discussing Michael Young's crucial contribution in the 1960s, founding the Consumers’ Association and Which as well as Where. Ordinary people needed better information as consumers of both private and public provision. They also needed to be active consumers exercising voice as well as choice. He saw the two as interdependent, though he did not use that language. His brilliantly entitled pamphlet on this theme ‘The chipped white cups of Dover’ was rejected by the Fabian Society as not being a serious part of social democratic concern, especially as it suggested a new party might be needed to take this all forward (Young Reference Young1960). From then on I was convinced he was profoundly right. Indeed, a concern with the power of producers in state-run monopolies had worried Fabians and other socialists from the early part of the century. Some more of this past context might have been helpful. Without it the choice agenda can just be dismissed as a nasty bi product of Mrs Thatcher.

The second element I missed was more on outcomes. Just what does the evidence tell us about the extension of choice in public services? How far has the balance of professional/consumer power actually changed over time? How does this differ between services, places and social groups? How far has output quality and efficiency changed as a result? There is a growing international literature on all this. In the end, it is what matters more than detailed textual analysis of Blair's speeches and New Labour documents.

Thirdly, the new (and old) economics is telling us that consumers are not king in the private market either. But nor are voters. Some more economic theory would have helped. We live in a messy world of market and government failure. Picking our way though these thickets means finding out what works for whom, in what contexts. It also needs more politics. How far has the failure of the choice agenda, or at least its slow progress, had to do with the exercise of producer power? This collection gets us part of the way in answering these questions.