Oliver Letwin is often mocked for putting things in over-complicated language, for talking about ‘a shift in the theory of the State from a provision-based paradigm to a framework-based paradigm’. But in his interview with the Wall Street Journal Europe, Letwin sums up the Cameron vision for public services with admirable clarity:
Tories who are looking for a pithy way to describe the party’s approach to public services on the doorstep could do a lot worse than to use this language.‘Hospitals compete for patients, schools compete for pupils, welfare providers compete for results in getting people out of welfare and into work. So we get to the point where it [the public sector] is efficient because it is answering to the people it is serving and not to bureaucracy.’
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