BOOK REVIEW Payment by results and social impact bonds: Outcome-based payment systems in the UK and US Kevin Albertson j Chris Fox j Chris O'Leary j Gary Painter j Kimberly Bailey, and Jessica Labarbera Bristol: Policy Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781447340706; £45 (Hbk) This six-chapter book provides an interesting, if largely uncritical, perspective on the use of outcomes-based funding mechanisms in the delivery of public services, in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Following an intro- ductory chapter, the theoretical underpinnings of outcomes-based commissioning are explored, before the attention turns to examples of programs in the United Kingdom and then the United States that are funded in such a way. A review of the evidence and a concluding chapter summarizing the situation and offering some cautions and some future directions complete the book. The book is short, coming in at just under 120 pages of text and much of the discussion about Payment by Results (PbR) and Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), feels somewhat limited. By way of example, the “detailed” discussion of the UK examples of the Work Programme (WP) and the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) are just over a page in length each. Robust criticisms of both programs are not included. The WP was accused by researchers of “cre- aming and parking”—providing support to people close to the labor market and ignoring those that might require more support to find work (Carter and Whitworth, 2015). These findings are referenced in the theoretical chapter but not mentioned in the discussion of the WP. The statement that local authorities delivering the TFP “achieved outcomes-based payments for families broadly in line with their local share of the target” (p. 37), is a fascinating way of reporting that around two-thirds of those local authorities claimed that they achieved a 100% success rate in “turning around” the lives of the families they worked with. Evidence regarding the gaming of the of the PbR aspect of the TFP, where local authorities claimed payments for families they had never worked with is, again, not men- tioned (Bawden, 2015; Crossley, 2015). In a brief discussion of arguments that the PbR and SIBs represent a depoliticization of policy-making, the authors rightly acknowledge that “such outsourcing decisions are themselves political” (p. 21) but the wider political and ideological context in which PbR and SIBs have emerged (in the United Kingdom at least) is not discussed in much detail. I cannot remember seeing the word austerity once in the book, nor any mention of the welfare state coming under the most sustained attack in recent years that it has ever faced. It is of course ironic that, through the “ideological reworking” of the 2007–08 financial crisis into a crisis of the welfare state, it is mechanisms of the mar- ket that are presented as the answer to many of the public sector funding problems they helped to create, as well as to many of the “social problems” that are linked to high levels of economic inequality (Clarke, & Newman, 2012). DOI: 10.1111/spol.12594 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Author. Social Policy & Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Soc Policy Adm. 2020;1–2. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spol 1