Introduction

The election of the Coalition government in 2010 brought contradicting ideologies of the role of the state and the way that it should be operating in relation to competition and outsourcing. Through the use of statecraft, the Labour government during 1997–2010 maintained the fulfilment of the commitments made through the World Trade Organisation agreements on the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and EU Single European Market (SEM) to liberalise the public sector. It continued to use the private finance initiative in the provision of public sector facilities and their management through projects such as Building Schools for the Future (Morphet, 2008; Mahony et al, 2011). It reduced the compulsory components of some aspects of competition for public services in local government while extending competition to all local authority services through best value (Wilson, 1999). It had introduced competition into education and health through a series of initiatives using the policy narrative of improved efficiency (Eyles and Machin, 2019; Guy, 2019). It introduced revised EU policy to support the third sector and the role of small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) into the competition framework through the creation of the Office of the Third Sector (Alcock, 2010).

When the Coalition government took power in 2010, its overriding ideology was for a small state (Gamble, 2015). The Prime Minister, David Cameron, continued the third sector and SME approach to providing public service delivery through his concept of a Big Society (Smith, 2010). There was some alignment to the government's ideology but this was not sufficiently developed to create an understandable political narrative. This confusion was noticed at the time by commentators (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012) but its provenance was not investigated. Within the Conservative Party, the principle of moving towards a small state led by George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Coalition government, created by reducing the public sector, through funding cuts under the austerity narrative, was pre-eminent. The focus was not so much on outsourcing but on preventing the public sector from having any resource to spend. Subsequently, as in the response to COVID-19, this has been to replace central and local government delivery by outsourced contractors (Monbiot, 2020).