Introduction

A key challenge for central government in implementing the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to liberalise public services when it came into effect in 1996 was to find a way of market making. It would be difficult to open public services to competition where there had been no private sector engagement before. In some public services, there had been little external provision. Introducing change and potential for opening internal processes to competition meant that private sector contractors would have to be attracted to establishing a capability to bid for this work (Walsh, 1995; Héritier, 2001). This was particularly in relation to professional and specialist functions in local and central government such as building control, finance, legal services and planning. In some services, it was possible to transfer skills between the public and private sectors very readily, such as human resources, although there continued to be differences in the cultural context of the public sector (Harris, 2008). In other local authority services, the development of private sector markets was encouraged through changes in regulation such as planning (Adams and Tiesdell, 2010; RTPI, 2019).

There were also challenges about the ways public bodies defined their activities, attributed costs and were managed. The role of performance management regimes was central to creating these markets in specifying what should be done and how it would be delivered, priced and measured (Bovaird and Gregory, 1996). In many cases, there was a need for new market making such as in building control. The deregulation of building control was common across a number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries including in the EU, Australia and Canada (Meijer and Visscher, 2006; Van der Heijden, 2010). In the UK, following the Building Act 1984, an independent provider of building control regulators, the National Housing and Building Council (NHBC), established a subsidiary company in 1985 to employ ‘approved inspectors’. Up to this point all building control had been undertaken by professional qualified inspectors employed by local authorities. The NHBC building control professionals became the preferred inspectors for many private sector development companies and their role was highlighted in the Grenfell Fire tragedy (Hodkinson, 2019).