To what extent is the market, in its current form, capable of ensuring that the quality of work done on legal aid is adequate? It has been argued throughout the book that the funding regime creates an explicit conflict between financial rationality and quality in the sense of ‘doing all the work the case needs’ and responsiveness to in-case demand. The peer-review criteria used by the LAA's independent peer review panel havebeen validated in other research and are applied by both practitioners and funders for substantive quality assessments, so are treated here as a reasonable framework for discussing quality (see Appendix). The market-based system of procurement introduced following the Carter review (2006) was intended to maintain quality through market mechanisms and that system of peer review.

The fundamental idea behind public-choice markets is that users have a choice of providers, who therefore have to compete for custom. They may compete for clients directly, or they may compete for a contract to provide a service to everyone who qualifies for it. In either case, the competition (hypothetically) means that providers have to offer a good quality of service (whatever ‘quality’ means to the choosers) at a reasonable cost (whatever that means to the payer).

Choice, Voice and Exit are the main strategies supposedly available to members of the public to maintain quality in public services (Hirschman 1970). They make a Choice of provider when they enter the market, based on reputation and whatever other factors are important to the user. If the service is not good enough, they exercise Voice, in the form of formal or informal complaints to the provider, community action, through elected representatives or via the media. If the service fails to improve, they Exit to another provider. A provider which is inadequate should lose more users, attract fewer new users, and be dogged by complaints until it is forced out of the market.

More recently, Le Grand (2007) incorporated these into his four overlapping models for achieving good public services:

• 1. Trust, where professionals are facilitated to deliver the service with minimal state or other interference;

• 2. Command and Control, where targets and performancemanagement requirements are imposed through a hierarchical structure which controls service delivery;

• 3. Voice; and

• 4. Choice, which includes Exit.