Partnering with Agents: How the Covid-19 Pandemic changed Relations between the UK Government and Public Service...

The contracting out of public goods and services has become a central feature of the UK's state machinery, with more than £350 billion spent annually on services ranging from rubbish collection to building submarines. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK government took the unprecedented step of incorporating private providers at a national scale to deliver emergency services which were previously the purview of the state. To achieve this, the government used emergency legislation temporarily to remove competitive tenders and reduced reporting processes. In doing so, it substantially re-orientated its relationship with private providers, moving from a position of a principal granting its authority to deliver services to something more akin to a partner organisation leveraging private resources. This shift in power dynamics, coupled with an ongoing government ambition to expand the UK's public service markets, risks a permanent change in government-provider relations, to the detriment of the UK's contracting out framework.