Mike Wood

Numerous reports, not least by the Institute for Government, have found that, in many areas of Government activity, outsourcing and public procurement from private providers improves service and value for money for the taxpayer. Of course, it can be done badly, and the Probation Service is the obvious example where it clearly never worked. Although the pandemic brought things to a critical point, it was becoming increasingly difficult even before then to argue that that private provision was providing a satisfactory service. We are still waiting for the national procurement policy statement, less than four weeks before the Procurement Act is due to commence. The new Government claim that the Act, in its current form, does not meet their vision for harnessing public procurement to deliver economic growth, value for money and social value, but it looks increasingly as though what they mean is that they want to use public contracts as a vehicle to expand trade union influence in Government, imposing costly and unnecessary regulatory burdens on businesses. In the absence of a national procurement policy statement, the Government are introducing further restrictions and bureaucracy through what they call “Make Work Pay”, but for a lot of employers that looks a lot like just making jobs more expensive. Businesses seeking Government contracts are to be required to demonstrate trade union recognition, access for union organisers, collective bargaining arrangements, adherence to so-called fair work standards that go well beyond legal obligations, and other social commitments. Recent parliamentary answers have confirmed that those requirements will apply not only to large firms, but to small and medium-sized enterprises, undoing a lot of the good work in the Procurement Act that aimed to open up public procurement contracts to a wider range of smaller businesses. This is not about ensuring fair treatment of workers. UK employment law already provides robust protections. This is about allowing unions to dictate the terms of our public procurement, favouring firms that meet ideological criteria rather than those that offer the best value and most efficient service.