Government has failed to manage contracts

A damning report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has pointed to government failures to manage the performance of out-sourced public services, and has also highlighted ways in which prominent private sector contractors have fallen short.

Firms seeking government contracts should be expected to behave with the same standards of honesty, integrity and fairness that apply to the public sector itself, MPs said.

Contracting out public services to the private sector was published last month.

In particular, the report said, public trust had been undermined “by the poor performance of G4S in supplying security guards for the Olympics, Capita’s failure to deliver court translation services, issues with Atos’s work capability assessments, misreporting of out of hours GP services by Serco”, and, most recently, “the astonishing news that G4S and Serco had overcharged for years on electronic tagging contracts”.

These high profile failures illustrated the contractors’ failure to live up to expected standards while exposing serious weaknesses in government capability in negotiating and managing private contracts on behalf of the taxpayer.

Among several areas cited by the report for improvement was the need for “far greater visibility to government, parliament and the public about suppliers’ performance, costs, revenues and profits”.

www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/public-services-private-contractors-report