Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

Author:Brett Christophers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Different parts of the public sector use different models for handing out contracts, although a central public-procurement resource, the Crown Commercial Service, is available for use by all. In view of the scale of the business it affords to contract rentiers, the DHSC merits particular attention. Here, an entity of especial importance is NHS England, a so-called ‘non-departmental public body’ within the Department, which handles the commissioning side of the NHS. Assisted by more than 200 smaller local Clinical Commissioning Groups around the country, NHS England tenders and administers the more than 50,000 contracts now in place between the NHS and the private sector.33 I will return to NHS contract commissioning later in the chapter.

Commissioning has obviously also become a major undertaking for local authorities, given the high share of council expenditure accounted for by external contracts. Indeed, in the most extreme cases – 50 per cent is only an average – commissioning is increasingly the core activity of local authorities. A wide variety of policy slogans have been invented to normalize this profound transformation in local authority operations. Colin Copus and his co-authors list seven of the most common: ‘Co-ordinating Council’, ‘Catalyst Council’, ‘Co-operative Council’, ‘Entrepreneurial Council’, ‘Future Council’, ‘easy-Council’ and, most plainly, ‘Commissioning Council’.34 Where this commissioning model has been pursued to its limits, local authorities have essentially become ‘brokers rather than providers’, in a context where ‘the scope of a councillor is only to award and administer outsourced contracts’.35 The most infamous example of such a ‘commissioning council’ has long been Barnet, in North London, whose ‘One Barnet’ programme, initiated in the early 2010s, saw it outsource around 70 per cent of council services.36

If we know who in the public sector is feeding contract rentiers their contracts, the next question is what those contracts consist of. What work is primarily being contracted out? There are, needless to say, major differences between different public-sector bodies in this regard. Take, for example, the two central government departments highlighted above: Health and Defence. Where the lion’s share (an estimated 94 per cent) of DHSC procurement is current resource expenditure – for example, hospital care, emergency care, community health services, mental health services, and primary care – contract expenditure at the MoD is much more evenly balanced between current and capital spending, the relatively greater weight of the latter reflecting, among other things, ‘the significant cost of weapons systems and maintaining the MoD estate’.37 More generally, it is worth noting a significant increase over the past decade or so in the proportion of overall public-sector outsourcing expenditure represented by capital procurement – contracts, that is, for the construction, repair and maintenance of assets (roads, hospitals, military equipment, and so on), rather than the provision of goods and services. In 2004/05, capital spending accounted for less than 17 per cent of public-sector contract expenditure; by 2017/18, that proportion had risen to 23 per cent (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 UK public-sector capital and current contract expenditure, 2004/5–2017/18

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