Outsourcing (Government Departments)

Debate between Jonathan Lord and Grahame Morris

Wednesday 25th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I am grateful, Mrs Main, for this opportunity, and it is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship for what I believe is the first time. Today, I hope to raise a very important issue, put down a few markers and seek some answers from the Minister to a series of questions that I will pose. I want to place on record my thanks to the Public and Commercial Services Union, the TUC and Unison for various pieces of briefing information that they have provided in support of my efforts today.

When the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General was Financial Secretary to the Treasury under John Major, he sought to

“extend competition in the provision of public services further and faster than ever before”.—[Official Report, 18 November 1991; Vol. 199, c. 25.]

He said that he would do so with no bias between public and private sector providers. It must surely have been a setback for him personally that, shortly after setting out that agenda, his then constituents in the North Warwickshire constituency decided to ditch him at the 1992 general election in favour of Labour representation. However, in 1997, he returned to Parliament in the far safer Conservative seat of Horsham and he waited patiently for 13 years in opposition before returning in 2010 to his privatisation agenda of 20 years earlier to make private everything that is public.

I give this preamble only to set out the context of the debate: we can all understand that an individual who has waited 20 years to achieve his ambition may be more keen to implement his policies and to do so somewhat quicker than otherwise would be the case. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman has made his intentions clear. In June 2011, he spoke to the business community on the subject of public service reform, saying:

“Spending cuts are one-offs. What we need to do, and are doing, is fundamentally change the way we operate.”

However, the problem with the coalition Government’s approach is that it is not evidence-based; it is ideologically driven. Whether they are outsourcing services, opening them up to a range of providers or decentralising them, the Government are gambling with the nation’s hard-won assets.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

We seem to be hearing a political diatribe against outsourcing. What would the hon. Gentleman say the previous Government were up to when they successfully outsourced many services? Indeed, many Labour councils, as well as Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils, followed in the footsteps of those pioneering Conservative councils of the early 1980s, by outsourcing services to give people a better service at lower cost.

[Grahame M. Morris]

The basis of my argument essentially is that there is no evidence base for that approach. If the hon. Gentleman will allow me to develop my argument a little further, I hope to illustrate that point.

If we look at the evidence base, it is in fact a constant lesson from history that reform has often come, as the hon. Gentleman has indicated, in the form of privatisations and outsourcing, but it has not always led to service improvement. Whether the justification for such reform has been a desire to bring perceived good practice from the private sector into the public sector or, indeed, the belief that savings can be made through outsourcing, the question that we parliamentarians must ask the Government and that I wish to put to the Minister is this: where is the evidence for those reforms?

I hope that the Minister will address this issue, which is about the economic and social evidence base rather than an ideological base that is behind what seems to be a rush to sell off services and public assets. It is my contention that the Tory-led policy on public services reform that is being followed by the coalition is ideologically driven and light on any such evidence base. I want to develop that point by presenting some evidence to suggest that the Government are on the wrong side of public opinion and, indeed, wrong about the whole issue of public service reform.

I hope that the Minister is aware of a report by Ipsos MORI entitled, “What do people want, need and expect from public services?” The report presents the most up-to-date and detailed data on current public attitudes to public services and public service reform. I want to put three headline findings on the record. First, people

“want public services to be based on notions of the public good, rather than just what’s good for me”.

Secondly, people

“understand the public good largely in terms of universalism, with equality of access to benefits”.

Thirdly, people

“struggle to see a compelling or urgent case for reforming public services to cope with economic pressures and social changes”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Grahame M. Morris]

I am afraid that I do not agree with the hon. Lady. The issue was raised during questions to the DWP on Monday—by myself, I think—and the papers this weekend illustrated a number of examples of service failure. Service users feel huge dissatisfaction with Atos and A4e, and there has been a huge uproar about the quality of service provision in training or retraining ex-offenders.

The evidence base is littered with failures from the private sector, so it is difficult to hold up an example. If there is a good example, I suspect that it might be the exception rather than the rule. Most often, there is a negative impact for employees, with the prevalence of short-term contracts and the use of part-time and temporary staff who are often recruited through employment agencies. Indeed, Unison commissioned a report on the rise of the multi-billion-pound private public services industry and raised significant concerns about the increased dependency on private firms.

The privatisation of public services has already become a huge industry, through which the private sector receives more than £80 billion of taxpayers’ money every year, yet it has become characterised by increased cost, deteriorating quality, the loss of accountability and the greater risk of service failure. The reason why we had the birth of municipal provision in the great northern cities—Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Wigan—was that the city fathers saw that public provision was more efficient and accountable than the existing private sector provision that was available at the time. Those arguments are not new in that respect.

I want to give another couple of examples. I mentioned A4e, and it would be remiss not to mention the Southern Cross care homes debacle. Other scandals in relation to welfare have also raised such issues and brought this agenda to the fore. That will happen more often as more services are passed over to the private sector. There is also a risk that we will lose control over our public services altogether. Indeed, in 2007, the Local Government Association warned that the amount of local authority spending on external private sector contracts and the ability of local government to make efficiency savings when it has already signed contracts without further damaging services was not realistic.

The Government’s central argument in favour of the increased commercialisation and privatisation of public services rests on the importance of consumer choice as a driver for increased efficiency, accountability and value for money. However, again, that is not supported by the evidence contained in the public surveys that have been carried out. One area that features genuine consumer choice is the provision of utilities. In most parts of the United Kingdom, people can choose a provider of gas or electricity from a handful of companies. However, is that a good example? There is massive public concern that prices have increased way above inflation and that the profits of the energy companies have soared. So the panacea of private-led competition is not everything that the coalition would have us believe it is.

[Jonathan Lord]

The hon. Gentleman is making a delightful speech in favour of socialism, the big state and the state always providing, whether nationally or locally. He talks about the utilities and so on. British Telecom is not perfect, but I remember as a young man when one had to wait weeks and weeks, if not months, to have a phone installed, and I think there was a choice of about three phones. As soon as BT was privatised, it saved taxpayers’ money and gave a much better service to its customers.