I think the challenge is to find the willing partners, but I think there are willing partners. Indeed, in my view the theory behind this concept is to allow people from outside of government to explore their ideas about how they can contribute to resolving some of the social problems that might be identified. Effectively, it is a little bit about unleashing innovation outside of government and it also is an opportunity to unleash funding or resources from outside of government to affect these kinds of problems.
I think that is what truly the innovation is. Obviously, government maintains its role and I know there has been some concern and criticism about these models in the sense that government is offsetting its responsibility. I think the real measure if you look at what's happened in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States particularly is that you don't see a reduction in government funding, but rather you see government maintain its funding and it's done in partnership. I think that's the signal the government's not offsetting its responsibility and downloading, but rather it's trying to expand the scope and the impact of its investments by partnering with others in using their investments.
I think it's something obviously that would have to be watched, but I think so far in the examples that we've seen governments aren't offsetting their responsibilities. They're trying to join up—that's just British language.
So I think that's the real effectiveness of these things. The other side of that where government has to be involved in maintaining its credibility in these activities, and again we were very conscious of it in the criminal justice sector, is that while we want to unleash and allow the private sector to come forward with its own ideas, government still has a responsibility to make sure those ideas are good ideas.
The example we used is, basically, government would have to assure that nobody is doing harm. If you wanted to do anger reduction through chocolate milk baths, as long as it didn't hurt anybody, so what? It's their money. If you wanted to do it by drugging people, government would have an opinion about that because you'd want to make sure that there was no harm done.
Those are things where government's do need to be involved, governments do need to set parameters, and governments are doing that in the models that you see around the world.