Introduction

The requirements on central government to liberalise services as part of the implementation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) provided an opportunity to distance the civil service from the more difficult and public-facing elements of its roles. Privatising delivery of these services enabled the introduction of performance management and cost-cutting measures that could be blamed on the contractor rather than the government. While the civil service and particularly the Home Office, often called the Ministry of the Interior in other countries, have traditionally had responsibility for police, borders, visas, migration and asylum, this has primarily been focused at a policy level. Until the late 1960s, governments had no particular interest in asylum or immigration policy as most of the post-war immigration to the UK had been from Commonwealth countries including the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent to meet employment shortfalls in UK public services (Timmins, 2001). Other migration between the UK and Commonwealth countries saw trends moving the other way as UK citizens migrated to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

The pressure on government departments to cut costs through the Rayner Scrutiny Reviews from 1980 onwards and then agencification through the creation of Next Steps Agencies in the late 1980s and early 1990s had generated some institutional change in the structure of the civil service (Gray and Jenkins, 1984; Dowding, 1995). While preparing to meet UK commitments for public service liberalisation through the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) and anticipated GATS agreements, central government implemented this by prioritising nationalised industries and local government (De Graaf and King, 1995; Parker, 2009). When approaching central government services, those that were public facing, employed more staff and were not regarded as strategic were peripheralised first, in anticipation of competition requirements on the civil service. This enabled a reduction in central department employee headcounts and was expected to reduce the day-to-day management burden of these services, allowing a focus on policy issues (Theakston, 1995). These services were primarily focused on clerical tasks including tax returns, social security and pensions that employed higher numbers of low-paid staff and required most face-toface contact. The use of agencification and then privatisation would allow the reformulation of pay bands that could lead to cost reductions in the front-line delivery services (Dowding, 1995).