The right-wing Policy Exchange has told the UK Government job centres should be broken up and forced to compete against private firms in helping people find work.

The thinktank envisages marketising the employability work of job centres. It says the rest of the service should be rebranded Citizen Support - to reduce the stigma attached to it.

This would allow each job-seeker to take their own budget and purchase the employability service most likely to help them, the report's authors suggest. (What would happen to the other bit of job centres - the one which slashes people's benefits for breaches of the rules, leaving them reliant on food banks - they do not say).

The proposal sounds so far from reality that some might think it unlikely to happen.

But the break up of face-to-face job centres is already on the cards in America, according to a document leaked from the US Social Security Administration last month. It envisaged field office closures, with staff "no longer working in centralised traditional offices". Instead, it says, administrative social security functions will be transferred online.

The reduction of direct provision of social services, and outsourcing to private providers goes on apace here, in other sectors. Increasing use of tendering exercises to procure care by councils is reducing the amount they provide themselves while often squeezing out specialist third sector provision.

Meanwhile, the doublethink of the personalisation agenda seems increasingly hard to question. It is remarkable how often I am contacted by readers who have disabilities or who are carers, who have been told they are getting a personal budget allowing them 'control' over the services they use. Yet when they say "I'd like to keep the service I've got, please", they are told that option is not available, or find the budget they're given will no longer cover it.

You risk sounding like a class warrior if you question whether it is right, or even efficient, to deliver public services for private profit. But it is surely reasonable to ask whether there are limits? Perhaps there are.

Former education secretary Michael Gove's removal in David Cameron's reshuffle appears to have rung closing time on one idea. The preposterous plan to allow private companies to bid for child protection work was seriously unpopular even after Mr Gove said only not-for profit firms could participate. Now it is not expected to go forward at all.