Capita: Company Profile

After Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation schemes and New Labour’s opening up of entire new public sector services to private competition, the coalition government is now advancing this neo-liberal agenda further with major new experiments in public sector ‘reforms’. By cutting public spending, the Tory-led coalition is forcing taxpayer-funded services to turn to the private sector, which is presented as ‘more efficient’ than the public sector.1

Not that there is any more evidence to support privatisation than there was in the Thatcher or Blair days. Following the Olympics security fiasco in summer 2012, when G4S failed to deliver its contract and provide enough security, the head of the Local Government Association Sir Merrick Cockell said the days of assuming that private companies offer the best way of delivering public services were “over”, in what the Financial Times described as “comments that may jolt the multibillion-pound outsourcing industry.” There had been a period, he added, “when ‘public bad, private good’ had almost been a mantra, accompanied by a belief that the right way for local authorities to do things was to outsource everything.” But that’s over now, he predicted, rather over-optimistically.2 Even ministers, such as defence secretary Philip Hammond and culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, called upon the government to “think again” about the private delivery of public services.3

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