The Labour government and the National Health Service

This paper reviews the performance of the National Health Service under the Labour government of Tony Blair. It shows that there have been some dramatic increases in resources going into the service, but also that these do not seem to be delivering the improvements in activities that might have been expected. The paper argues that this is partly because of capacity constraints, but also because the mixture of organizational forms introduced by the government has resulted in misdirected and conflicting incentive structures for the key actors.