Privatisation Doesn't Work - It puts the public purse at risk

In May 2014 We Own it highlighted growing anger against Serco, who were under investigation for defrauding the public purse, were still allowed to bid for public work.

A poll, carried out by Survation for campaign group We Own It, showed an increase in support for public services being run by government when companies are found guilty of mismanagement or defrauding taxpayers.

The new polling shows that outsourcing companies like Serco, Atos, Capita and G4S have the lowest levels of trust compared to other organisations like central government and the civil service.

The full article with links to the poll can be found here.

Out Source Shared Services and Corporate Functions at any cost

On the 11th February 2016 the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in a message to all staff working in Defence Business Services (the MODs corporate and personnel shared service function) announced that they ‘would bring in a contractor to act as our partner in running DBS as a whole’ under a new contracting model called ‘Corporate Services Integration and Innovation Provider’.

It would appear that the option of DBS being run by the public sector in the defence interest has been written off. Instead the MOD would rather throw good money after bad after not learning any lessons from its already well documented contracting failures.

The drive to privatise government shared services has resulted in bad decisions that have cost the public purse millions of pounds in undelivered savings, increased change costs and all at no risk to the private sector who continue to walk away with payments for outputs the civil service and public sector could have delivered, and delivered more.

Over the coming months we will be documenting evidence to back our position that corporate and shared service functions currently in the MOD should remain in the MOD if real value and security in delivering defence outputs is to be achieved.