Contracting personalization by results: comparing marketization reforms in Australia and the UK

Market instruments are increasingly being used to drive innovation and efficiency in public services. Meanwhile, many governments recognize the need for services to be more personalized and ‘user-centred’. This was a key aim of major welfare-to-work reforms in both the UK and Australia over the past decade, which sought to achieve personalization through increasing service delivery by for-profit providers, contracted via Payment-by-Results. Drawing on three surveys of frontline staff, we show the impact of recent UK and Australian marketization reforms on frontline practices to consider whether the reform mixof increased commercial provision tied to Payment-by-Results has produced more personalized services. We find that the UK’s ‘black box’ model was associated with some increase in frontline discretion, but little evidence that this enhanced service personalization, either compared to previous programmes or to Australia’s more regulated system