The collapse of Carillion.

The market has failed us. The profiteers have robbed us. It is time we drummed organisations, including the beleaguered UK construction and services giant, out of public services for good, says Virginia Moffatt ... 

In 2012 I was working for Oxfordshire County Council in a team commissioning social care. It was in the early days of austerity, and the council, like many others, was looking to make savings.  Though every year we’d been finding more efficient ways of doing things, our severely reduced budgets had resulted in every aspect of the council’s work coming under scrutiny.  As a result there were restructures and back office mergers, cuts to front line services and a drive to outsource. 

One of the services to be outsourced was facilities management. Oxfordshire has many buildings across the county, and the reasoning was that a private firm could manage these more cheaply than we could. This would enable corporate services to meet their savings targets and also focus on strategic issues such as managing the services available to the public.  So, in 2012 the services were tendered and the contract was awarded to Carillion.

The result was immediately disastrous.  I worked on the fourth floor at County Hall. Prior to Carillion taking over the contract, repairs and maintenance seemed to work smoothly. But once Carillion was in charge one or other of the lifts was constantly broken. When the women’s toilets weren’t working, they were out of action for weeks. A water heater in our kitchen took ages to repair, resulting in a constant log jam in our tiny kitchen as staff waited for the one kettle to boil.  The situation hadn’t improved when I left in 2014. So it was no surprise to me when the Council announced last year that it was bringing the services back in-house. In the light of Carillion’s collapse this week, Oxfordshire must be sighing with relief that it got out just in time.

The decision to outsource facilities management was not, necessarily, a bad one. Outsourcing is a tool available to organisations across the public and private sector, enabling them to bring specialists in to manage one aspect of the work, focus on core business and save money. However, when outsourcing becomes ideologically driven by the idea that the private sector is always best, then it becomes more problematic.  Such flawed thinking in the UK has been exacerbated in the last decade by a combination of austerity, globalisation, and aggressive bidding from huge corporate entities. And it has led to vast swathes of public sector services being run at low cost for maximum profit, resulting in poor delivery and efficiency.

Carillion is not the first company to go bankrupt, and it won’t be the last. Like many others it appears to have lost its way due to overextending its business, expanding into areas where it has no expertise, providing services at the cheapest cost. But the reason it matters is due to the extent of public sector services it currently manages .  These include construction projects, facilities management and catering services for councils, the NHS and schools, many of which will have been served as poorly as we were, while the company made enormous profits for shareholders.  No wonder the failure of Carillion is making headlines this week.

Last year I was involved in three books that DLT published, which all have something to say on this ongoing outsourcing scandal.  In Feast or Famine?, a Lent course edited by Simon Barrow, I and, other writers, detailed how austerity is impacting on the poorest of society, and note the impact of privatisation. My own Lent course, Nothing More and Nothing Less takes the film ‘I,Daniel Blake’ as a starting point to discuss oppression and struggle. Here, I consider how the outsourcing of assessment of sick and disabled people to first Atos, and now Maximus, has resulted in appalling and  unnecessary human suffering. My first essay in Reclaiming the Common Good: How Christians can help re-build our broken world identifies how rolling back the state has led to multiple failures of outsourcing projects to companies such as G4S, Capita and Atos. In my second I suggest that it is time to roll back the market. I propose that instead of focussing on wealth creation we invest in developing wealthy communities, where the role of the private sector is limited, and public services are provided by non-profit or state bodies working for the common good.

There’s an old adage that every threat can be an opportunity.  This week what is happening to Carillion looks disastrous, and must certainly feel like that for staff worrying about whether they’ll have a job. But, if managed right, it could actually provide the turning point that this country needs.

Because the market has failed us. The profiteers have robbed us. It is time we drummed them out of public services for good.

Virginia Moffatt is author of Nothing More and Nothing Less: A Lent Course based on the film I, Daniel Blake, newly available for Lent 2018 in paperback. She contributed to Simon Barrow’s Feast or Famine? How the gospel challenges austerity also newly available for Lent 2018. Meanwhile, she was editor-in-chief of the key note book at Greenbelt 2017, Reclaiming the Common Good: How Christians can help re-build our broken world, available now in paperback.