Carillion and Public Sector Outsourcing

Debate between Rupa Huq and Jon Trickett

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful and unanswerable point.

We want a categorical assurance that the jobs of the subcontractors and employees are protected and that the services will be sustained. Is it not clear that the Government played roulette with people’s livelihoods in the most reckless manner? The truth is that the Government have been so wedded to the dogmatic idea that the private is always good and the public is always bad that they never questioned the existing orthodoxy, even when the evidence was right in front of their nose.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jon Trickett]

I will give way, but I want to make some progress.

[Dr Huq]

I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell): it is a pleasure to see you back in your place, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) shared my horror today at pages 4 and 5 of the Daily Mirror, which report:

“‘Greed and lunacy’ as Carillion paid shareholders £500m while pension…hole spiralled out of control.”

Surely any company of this magnitude should meet its statutory obligations before paying out dividends to shareholders.

[Jon Trickett]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. In the 16 years up to 2016, the dividends paid to shareholders increased every single year, while the pension pot and the conditions of work and the pay that the workers received was diminishing. By the way, Mr Deputy Speaker, I met a subcontractor of Carillion the other day, who told me that the company had a policy of not paying anybody in December, because on 1 January the bank wanted to look and see how much liquidity was left. Is that not shocking?

Maybe the Government’s devotion to outsourcing is the real reason why they have failed so monumentally in relation to Carillion. They had a blind assumption—and still have—that contracting out works efficiently, and that the market always knows best, which we know is not the case. If they do not learn from the repeated failures of outsourcing, there will be another Carillion around the corner, and then another and another. One needs only to look at companies such as Interserve and Mitie, which deliver public services, to see how fragile some of these Government contractors are.