| Teaser Text | AEA’s Ken Hall considers how waste management procurement is creating a number of challenges for local authority officers as they strive to meet targets and provide value for money
A recent article in the business pages of one of our daily broadsheets described how a well-known UK support service company was having increasing success as cash strapped governments, locally, nationally and internationally, were outsourcing work to the private sector. This brought back memories of the last great wave of change that impacted on local government procurement with the advent of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in public sector service provision.
The heady days of the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a small trickle of local government officers cross over to the dark side of “private sector” public service provision. The drivers for that last change were different of course, less monetary and more, shall we say, political. The net result was the creation of a new hierarchy. The private sector was presented with the opportunity to be responsible for delivering services that had historically been the responsibility of “the council” and the public sector stood back, set the agenda for letting contracts and woke up to accountability, efficiency and service standards. Overnight all those dustbins became “the customer” and it was all done in the now widely accepted ethos of service efficiency and satisfying the requirements of the customer. And to think we had been emptying those same bins for generations! |
