The introduction of competition and outsourcing in the UK since the early 1970s has had a profound effect on the role, delivery and content of public services. It represented a major policy punctuation that shifted public services from direct to indirect delivery for the user (Gyford, 1991; Walsh, 1995). This has created a sense of detachment between organisations that remain responsible for the service and recipients (Kelly, 2007). Public organisations have mediated their understanding of service requirements with the quality of delivery and performance. However, public organisations never lose their responsibility for services purchased from third parties. Their accountabilities remain the same.

These changes in public sector delivery are frequently termed as privatisation although nothing in the international agreements and their associated legal frameworks for public sector liberalisation have required specific service transfer from public to other sectors. Rather there has been an agreement that they should be open to competition (Jackson et al, 1982). While the introduction of outsourcing is strongly associated with Margaret Thatcher's ideology in favour of the market over the state (Gamble, 1989; Marsh, 1991), the agreement to liberalise the public sector, exposing public services to competition, was made by the Labour government in 1976 (Morphet, 2013). This decision came after the government had been forced to seek financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1976 (Burk and Cairncross, 1992; Parker, 2009; Lowe, 2011). However, the international framework for liberalising the public sector had already been discussed and set as part of a longer term process of international trade discussions within the World Trade Organization's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT). These discussions were part of the Tokyo Round of trade negotiations that lasted between 1973 and 1980 (Hoekman, 1995).

While the Conservative Party had always been in favour of reducing the welfare state and replacing it with the private sector (Lee, 2015; Mount, 2020a), Thatcher was more cautious about this before she became Prime Minister. Her 1979 manifesto included a commitment for local authority tenants to have the right to buy their council homes, but there was no commitment to privatisation (Seldon and Collings, 2014). Thatcher's election could also be seen as a temporal convenience (Goetz and Meyer-Sahling, 2009) that allowed the civil service to use a change in Prime Minister to implement the liberalising elements of the GATT agreement, developing and harnessing Thatcher's ideology.