Introduction

In this concluding chapter, the major questions that arise from over 40 years of public sector liberalisation and consequent outsourcing are considered. As this book has demonstrated, the UK response to the implementation of the opening of competition across the public sector has been undertaken in a number of waves while some of the institutional restructuring in central government has been used as a mechanism to delay or prevent the introduction of any competition or external provision. Where outsourcing has been a method deployed by central government, it has been on the assumption that the operational practices required for external service delivery based on contracts and legal agreements do not apply and that control is still from the commissioning department. We have also noted that some of the attempts to apply liberalisation have not been successful and the government has had to take back major health and transport infrastructure projects to manage directly at financial and social cost to the country (NAO, 2020b; DfT, 2020). We have also noted that this detachment of the civil service from operational management has reduced its capacity to specify and manage contracts and to cope in a crisis (Dunhill and Syal, 2020). As the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates, it no longer appears to know which levers to pull and have turned to personal and political contacts to fill these gaps (NAO, 2020g).

At the same time, local government has managed to adapt to a mixed economy, to move services in and out of contracted delivery. The introduction of austerity in 2010 has allowed local authorities to develop and innovate further to include different forms of service provision working with each other and the community and to rediscover its role in providing housing both to meet needs and to generate income (Morphet and Clifford, 2020). For the National Health Service and education, there has been some liberalisation, although again this has not been wholly successful. In education, the introduction of free schools and academies has detached the ownership of outcomes from local authorities while they remain responsible to the government for school performance. Some free schools have failed and many academy schools have not improved outcomes for their children.