A few years ago I attended a civil service briefing for journalists and stakeholders in a government department in Whitehall. The laptop computer driving the projector – which was to illustrate the theme of the briefing with a series of persuasive graphs and charts – was faulty. After 15 minutes of ineffective tinkering, the officials suggested we could go ahead without the slides. “Why not call IT, and get them to come and fix it?”, I asked. Alas, that was impossible, I was sheepishly told. Under the terms of the department’s outsourced IT maintenance contract, staff were allowed 30 repair calls a month. Any calls fulfilled by the private IT firm after that would be charged for at a massive premium. The department could not countenance that extra cost in an era of shrinking budgets. So laptops didn’t always get fixed. A minor irritation in the great scheme of things, but a useful illustration in miniature of the pitfalls and paradoxes of the phenomenon of outsourced public services: cheaper doesn’t always mean more efficient; leaner doesn’t automatically mean more effective; and the contract is king.

‘What matters is what works’ was for some years a voguish rallying cry for those arguing for the privatisation of public services. It’s an oddly disinterested phrase, one that suggests that the speaker doesn’t care either way who provides the service, although in practice it almost invariably justifies a decision to introduce market disciplines into the welfare state, be it the NHS, older people’s care, social security benefits assessments, probation services or even child protection. Privatisation, the enthusiasts proposed, was a matter of managerial common sense and organisational logic, rather than ideological preference. They bought wholesale the great claim of the silver-tongued outsourcers that ‘contracting out’ to private firms would be intrinsically more dynamic and efficient than leaving services with entrenched and hidebound state-run providers. Private firms would be more nimble, dynamic, and more innovative. A wave of the magic wand of market discipline would transform these moribund services, make them cheaper, better, more efficient.

Of course, state-run services need regular renewal. Without challenge and change they can be monolithic and ponderous, hiding unresponsive and unsafe services behind a flag of public sector virtue. All organisations can become complacent, and ineffective, stifling staff ingenuity and crucially losing focus on the needs of service users.