So the private sector will be committing daylight robbery by stealing from the public sector. Private sector companies are rubbing their greedy hands, salivating from collective mouths while sizing up the contracts, all that lurvely lucre.
Welcome to Outsourcing UK Plc….where everyday life will be dictated by the private sector driven by profit!
Outsourcing firms are preparing for a bonanza of local authority contracts to provide everything from bin men to back office bureaucrats and have reported a doubling in the number of deals on offer this year. Private health companies are also expecting to earn billions of pounds from the planned overhaul of the NHS in which GPs would take over responsibility for spending £70bn.
Executives at Capita, the UK’s largest outsourcing firm, said the number of opportunities for local authority contracts has already doubled this year and they see the healthcare market as “vast and potentially lucrative”.
Richard Marchant, head of local government strategic partnerships at Capita, an FTSE-100 company which already works for councils in Harrow, Swindon, Southampton and Sheffield, said: “A major problem for the public sector is, we feel, a significant opportunity for us. Opportunities are at their highest level in two to three years. This year we have probably seen a 100% increase in opportunities [compared with 2009] and I suspect we will see another 50% increase in the following year.”
Expect to see fraud as accountability disappears when it comes to keeping track on the private sector. Funny how Andy ‘aspirational socialism’ Burnham is appalled by this (“Some private operators are going to have a field day, making a fortune from a system which will offer less public accountability.”) yet …. and yet…. he was part of a government that created the conditions, softened up the public sector for private takeover and marketisation. Ideologically speaking NL started it and you only have to look at welfare reform….
With the private sector running the show it won’t be about services for the common good but it will be about the shareholders. And the private sector won’t come cheap either at some stage they will be bailed out by the government. Where will be the democratic accountability and transparency? What about terms and conditions for workers? Dismantling and selling off the public sector and the welfare state spells disaster, the public cost of marketisation will be huge. It won’t be about “public services” but profit and incentives. And the private sector will fail at delivering.
Dexter Whitfield argues neoliberalism drives marketisation (the book may be called “New Labour’s Attack on Public Services”….but it is still very relevant and arguments still valid as NL created the conditions for wholesale marketisation).
Furthermore he states: In crude terms, business interests perceive the public sector as a multi-billion market. Business and right-wing political interests have never been happy that the public sector delivers many of its own services and has consistently sought to challenge and undermine public service provision. For business it represents a vast new market. The business case to marketise and privatise public services to provide access to this vast new market is couched in terms of efficiency and value for money, but they are just part of a self-fulfilling propaganda war.
Welcome to the brave new exploitative corporate world…what is your bet that in a few years time the remaining public services will be privatised, wages and conditions will be worse, services will be worse or non-existent and all the hooh-hah about the deficit will have gone even though public borrowing will be the same/higher?
