Competition within publicly funded services such as school education and the NHS is a hard idea to sell. The idea that it might be desirable for publicly funded schools to compete with one another for pupils or NHS hospitals to compete for patients strikes many people as bizarre at best and positively evil at worst. The fear seems to be two fold: that such competition will damage the quality of service, and that the competition will come from the private sector, hence privatising or hollowing out the ‘real’ NHS or public education