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Introduction

The privatisation and outsourcing of public services has been a constant threat to those services and the staff who deliver them for more than two decades now.  First pursued aggressively by Conservative governments in  the 1980s and 1990s, the programme and ideology of privatisation has, if anything accelerated under Labour since 1997.  A variety of mechanisms such as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public and Private Partnerships (PPP) have been used to advance this agenda. 

The usual result of these initiatives is a decline in the quality of service delivery and in the pay, terms and conditions of staff transferred to private employers.  There are, though, a number of things that PCS representatives can do to ensure that members faced with transfer to the private sector are protected, from fighting the original proposal at an early stage, through intensive negotiations with bidders for the contract to ensure that good terms and conditions are maintained, to organising robustly to ensure that if a transfer goes ahead PCS is still able to effectively represent members in the commercial sector. 

This toolkit is designed to help PCS representatives through these stages of dealing with privatisation and outsourcing, providing links to useful information, and practical suggestions and advice.  For those seeking more detailed legalistic or technical information, further guides are available from PCS PRIBS.

Background

The Treasury maintains that greater labour-market “flexibility”, and the increasing use of the private sector in the public sphere will produce efficiency savings and improve the overall performance of public services.  PCS, as a campaigning union, has been at the forefront of challenging this view, which we regard as more ideological dogma than evidence-based policy.  Experience has shown that privatisation usually has a detrimental impact on the delivery of government services, as well as on the pay and conditions of public sector employees as a whole.  

PCS has vast knowledge and experience of campaigning against privatisation and protecting members interests before, during and after their transfer from the public sector to private sector. The aim of this toolkit is to help PCS representatives:

  • identify risks to members being transferred
  • challenge assumptions about the benefits of transferring services from the public sector to the private sector in order to ensure outsourcing is stopped or at least minimised
  • understand what they could and should expect from consultation during any transfer negotiations or process
  • be centrally involved in the process of assessing bidders for contracts
  • ask and assess the answers to key questions relating to a transfer, including TUPE, to protect members current and future terms and conditions
  • know where to go for help during this process
  • represent the interests of members before and after a transfer.

Private sector

Private sector involvement in public services is not a new idea. PCS members have experienced a range of initiatives from market testing to PPP, covering a plethora of existing and new activities, including contracting out, PFI and full-scale privatisation, but also partnerships, wider markets, and joint ventures between public and private sector organisations.

PCS reps face many challenges when campaigning against these initiatives.  It is essential to have a coherent strategy and sound tactics in place to effectively respond to the threat of privatisation.

Outsourcing (contracting out)

This tool-kit is primarily aimed to assist those involved in outsourcing, but the basic campaign techniques can be applied to most forms of privatisation. Although there is nothing new about contracting out services in the civil service, departments are now looking more ever more towards developing long-term contracts with private sector partners. Strategic contracting out may mean greater restructuring by the private contractor, more investment in assets, and contracts of more than 5 years.

An emphasis on outcomes rather than outputs has also meant that private contractors are having more of an influence on how services are to be delivered. Nevertheless, departments are still bound by Cabinet Office and Treasury rules as well as procurement regulations, which require competition for public contracts.  This also applies in secondary (private-private) TUPE transfers of former civil servants.

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