Considering that without a doubt, the outsourcing (privatisation) of our public services has contributed to our horrendous UK death toil from Covid (poorly resourced care homes run by private equity funds; privatised hospital cleaners, cooks and porters forced to work despite being ill since they have no occupational sick pay; sale of council homes causing families to live in overcrowded and unfit homes...) it is wrong to outsource our response.
While there is a role for the private sector in this emergency, I wish for example that we had the funding in Newham, early on in the pandemic to have expanded our experienced public health team to "track and trace" infection.
Please sign this Labour Unions petition
"Over £1.7 billion has been spent by the UK Government with private companies to manage its Covid-19 response.
The usual tendering processes have been bypassed and new deals signed. Serco has been hired for contact tracing, big accountancy firms have advised on PPE logistics and Amazon are delivering test kits.
The UK Government has turbo charged outsourcing, when we know outsourcing has been shown time and again to be bad for workers, taxpayers and the public.
The stakes are so high – the UK Government should not be outsourcing responsibility when the capacity and expertise to do this work exists within the public sector.
We are calling for:
- Full transparency over how these contracts were discussed and agreed upon
- An end to the UK Government’s approach of automatically outsourcing at the expense of using existing public sector experience and expertise
- Investment in the public sector to build knowledge and in-house expertise by employing and training staff directly"
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