Today’s ‘offer‘ by G4S to reimburse the public purse by £24.1m following revelations of overcharging is merely the latest turn in a series of outsourcing controversies that have shaken public confidence in the government’s public service reform agenda. This comes on top of the widely catalogued failures of the Work Programme and growing concern about the rushed privatisation of the probation service. While each of these problems has its own independent sources, they are in fact signs of a whole public service reform paradigm in retreat.
In part the problem is a lack of openness and it is right, as Sadiq Khan has argued, that all those providing public services should be subject to the same transparency requirements. But the problem goes much deeper than this.
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