In common with other developed economies the UK has, over the past 15 years, sought a marked shift in the function of social security away from ‘passive’ benefits to an ‘activating’ welfare system where access to social security for working-age people is linked to the responsibility to seek paid work (Bonoli, 2013). In parallel with this ‘activation turn’ (Bonoli, 2010), reforms to the institutional arrangements of welfareto- work services have introduced quasi-markets by separating the roles of those purchasing and providing services. Importantly, marketisation captures a diverse set of processes (Greener, 2008) and the actual form that the quasi-market takes can vary substantially depending on how policy-makers structure the intersection of competition and choice (Wiggan, 2015a). The UK is generally understood as a committed marketiser (Wiggan, 2015a, p 119), and the scope and experimentation involved in its marketising efforts position it at the bleeding edge of international reform experiences.

With the application of highly marketised welfare-to-work provision in the UK there has been a large and persistent gulf in the employment outcomes for those participants who have a limiting health condition or who report a disability and those others who do not. This jars against the ambition of the large-scale, nationwide Work Programme to ‘ensure that providers have strong incentives to help all of their customers’, and close the performance gap between the easiest- and hardest-to-help (DWP, 2012, p 6; emphasis added). The gulf in outcomes now also sits uncomfortably against the government's manifesto commitment to tackle the disability employment gap and ‘get 1 million more people with disabilities into employment over the next ten years’ (Conservative Party, 2017, p 57). Voluntary sector organisations and think tanks have been united in arguing that the ambition for such high levels of employment cannot be reached on the basis of the current performance of welfare-to-work programmes (Purvis et al, 2014; Oakley, 2015; Disability Rights UK, 2016).

Somewhat peculiarly, given policy-makers’ confidence that the ‘universal’ Work Programme can effectively and simultaneously serve a large cohort of participants with a highly diverse set of characteristics, work experiences and employment support needs (DWP, 2012; WPSC, 2013), there is a parallel programme, Work Choice. Work Choice is a voluntary programme focused on those individuals whose health and disability-related support needs mean that standard Jobcentre Plus support is unlikely to be appropriate.