Interesting report from the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) on the case for insourcing public contracts, showing how the Austerity programme had led to changes in procurement decisions
The report includes a number of case studies. They show that insourcing of takes places across a broad range of services.
“Insourcing reinstates the ability for elected local councillors to determine what resources should go to where. Outsourcing is found to detach the cable from the local lever. Insourcing restores the cable and puts control back into the local democratic institution.”
Insourcing is seen as pragmatic way of improving delivery in terms of efficiency and address specific local needs.
A key driver for this change is the austerity programme. Significant cuts to council budgets has highlighted the inflexibility and inefficiency of private sector involvement.
Councils are therefore better off bringing services in-house to take back control of delivery and benefit from the flexibility it offers.
This highlights a serious side effect to the austerity programme, i.e. a complete overhaul in service delivery. Unlikely Government had considered this to be the end result of the programme.
Gert Kamstrup 