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Debate between Deidre Brock and Oliver Dowden(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Oliver Dowden
I thank my hon. Friend for that question, and this is an important point about profit warnings. A profit warning does not mean that a company is imminently going to collapse. A profit warning is a warning to the markets that its results will not be in line with what it had previously thought. If every time that a company issued a profit warning, we as a Government said that we would cease to contract with them, there would be very few companies we could contract with. I will not name leading companies, because I do not want to influence their market value, but I could name a huge list of FTSE 100 companies that routinely issue profit warnings. That does not mean that they are about to disappear.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
For the second time in two weeks, we are discussing a private firm, responsible for the delivery of vital services, that has caught us cold with a profit warning. Will the Minister now acknowledge that there is a role for a proper public sector? Will the Government now start to roll back on the privatisation agenda that they and the previous Labour Government obsessed about? Can we look forward to a proper plan for taking public services back into the public sector? And will he now acknowledge that public sector employees should deliver public services?
Oliver Dowden
Of course we acknowledge that there is a proper role for the public sector. That is why, for example, this Government committed at the last election to providing £8 billion more for the NHS and a further £6 billion more for the NHS. To go to the core of the hon. Lady’s argument, the reason that successive Governments of all political persuasions have chosen to engage with the private sector for the delivery of services is that those companies have a speciality in it. They have a speciality in delivering such services, so they can deliver them more efficiently. That means there are savings for the taxpayer. If the Scottish National party position is seriously that we should not have any outsourcing, they need to explain to taxpayers why, instead of ploughing those efficiency savings back into our schools and hospitals, they are choosing to use them to pay for less efficient ways of delivering public services.