The coronavirus pandemic has revealed quite a bit about British society – the fragility of the financial system, the insecure scenario so many employees discover themselves in – but it surely has additionally shone a light-weight on the state itself. Many comparisons have been made between the present mobilisation of state sources and the second world conflict. However whereas that disaster concerned a ramping up of public sector capability, this one is being managed by a state that believes itself to be completely depending on the non-public sector.

First, there are the outsourcing giants, shadowy firms who’ve been handed quite a few contracts over the previous 20 years. Matt Hancock has put Serco in control of the phonelines for contact tracing, an important a part of the federal government’s public well being technique. This can be a firm that mismanaged knowledge at a GP surgery, and failed to coach workers correctly for a breast cancer hotline service. Together with G4S, it claimed cash from the federal government for monitoring prisoners who have been later found to be dead.

You may additionally keep in mind G4S – which helps out with the brand new testing centres in addition to safety for Nightingale hospitals – for its failure to provide security for the 2012 Olympics. In the meantime Capita has a contract to assist the NHS recruit returning nurses and medical doctors. This is similar Capita that precipitated complications for medical doctors all over the place by wrongly archiving 148,000 affected person medical data.

Then there are the administration consultants and accountants. Matt Hancock has chosen Deloitte, one of many “massive 4” accountancy giants, to advise on PPE nationally, in addition to handle logistics for testing centres and new laboratories for processing samples. This is likely one of the consultancies that has advised the NHS on find out how to reduce and privatise itself for years. Analysis clearly reveals that personal sector administration consultants not solely fail to improve efficiency in our NHS, they really make issues worse.

Lastly, within the realm of tech, the US knowledge mining group Palantir, headed by a Silicon Valley billionaire, is gathering information from NHS trusts on PPE; and Amazon is delivering testing kits, despite being criticised by its personal employees for its response to Covid-19.

In handing out profitable new contracts to those non-public firms – the worth of which the federal government has refused to reveal – ministers have used particular powers that permit them to award contracts by bypassing the standard tendering course of. Though such a mechanism seems logical in an emergency, its existence is a testomony each to the best way the British state has depleted its personal means to handle affairs and its automated presumption in favour of outsourcing.

The general public sector might and will use its current information and in-house experience to get the job performed, using and coaching workers as wanted to cope with this disaster immediately. That is precisely what occurred, for instance, when the Division for Transport rescued 140,000 holidaymakers left stranded after the collapse of Thomas Prepare dinner final yr. The NHS domestically might plan the supply of significant responses like monitoring and testing, utilizing its current information and experience and involving native communities.

And whereas outsourcing has been justified over time by the language of “cost-saving”, the reality is that that is about ideology.

Take the NHS, the place outsourcing has been one of many most important methods governments have achieved privatisation by stealth. How did this occur? Within the 1980s, the federal government began to privatise laundry, catering and cleansing within the well being service – outsourcing workers on worse phrases and circumstances to save cash. And the impression this had on outcomes was clear, as non-public cleansing firms persistently reduce corners. Outsourcing – whether or not it’s cleansing, services administration, GP “out-of-hours” companies, remedy centres, medical companies or IT – has typically damaged the quality of affected person care.

In 2006, the Blair authorities privatised the NHS provide chain, now chargeable for delivering PPE. And in 2012, David Cameron’s authorities launched the Well being and Social Care Act, permitting NHS companies to be contracted out to “any certified supplier”. Personal corporations, typically working underneath the NHS emblem, got a staggering £9.2bn in NHS contracts in 2018.

The chief govt at Epsom hospital has requested to take over the management of the flagship testing centre at Chessington, after Deloitte’s failings led to NHS workers take a look at outcomes being blended up and misplaced.

What the hospital managers recognised is what the analysis has been telling us for years: the proof does not support the lazy assumption that outsourcing or privatisation is inherently extra environment friendly.

This authorities has a deep mistrust of the state. However in attempting and failing to outsource this disaster to the non-public sector, it ought to begin to recognise the pressing have to rebuild state capability in order that important companies might be delivered in home – each as an emergency measure and as a smart long-term coverage.

• Cat Hobbs is the founding father of We Own It, an organisation that campaigns for public possession of public companies