Wednesday 5 December 2012

Capita and the Outsourcerers: Poof! Goes the Welfare State | Occupy News Network



In just the first half of 2012, Capita: The British Government’s Favourite Outsourcerer, won over £900m of contracts to provide services previously delivered by the public sector.  This is three times the business it won during the same period just one year earlier.  However, the latter half of this year has seen this ‘achievement’ dwarfed by the news that Capita has been selected as the preferred bidder for a £1.7bn contract to provide ‘educational support services’ for schools across Staffordshire. With Capita poised to gobble up even more of Britain’s public services, today’s article shed light on who Capita are, how much of Britain they own, and why we should all be paying better attention to the rise of the Outsourcerer.
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...........................CLICK ON LINK BELOW FOR FULL ARTICLE............................

Today, the outsourcing market for public services stands at over £80bn, with the Coalition Government announcing a further £70bn of services soon to be opened out for tender.  This, together with the visceral attacks on the provisions of the welfare state, is somewhat reminiscent of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which heralded the Workhouse.
Indeed, what is happening today in the UK, rather than being a modernisation, as it is billed, is infact a regressive step back in time.  The ideas of private companies delivering education, health, transport, post, energy and other services is not new.  It is old.  It is how things used to be done.  It failed miserably.  The idea that private services operate fairly and that philanthropy, charity and voluntarism can deliver a fair society belongs in the past along with its workhouses and its pauper lists.
The Welfare State rose out of the failure of this approach, to ensure that through our contributions in tax and national insurance, every citizen was guaranteed access to healthcare, education and all the other supporting elements of the social contract.  If this was breached, the electorate could hold those offices of state to account.  Not so in 2012.  So, it seems, we are called to repeat history and take back the services which we all need, out of the hands of private interests, and into the hands of those with a stake in the public interest.
Get Involved
Join Residents of Barnet to protest Capita’s ever growing slice of the Council Budget – here
Keep up to speed on the latest sell offs at Corporate Watch – here
Organisations to watch:

[1] All figures and information in this section sourced from: http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/pages/our-history.aspx
Today, the outsourcing market for public services stands at over £80bn, with the Coalition Government announcing a further £70bn of services soon to be opened out for tender.  This, together with the visceral attacks on the provisions of the welfare state, is somewhat reminiscent of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which heralded the Workhouse.
Indeed, what is happening today in the UK, rather than being a modernisation, as it is billed, is infact a regressive step back in time.  The ideas of private companies delivering education, health, transport, post, energy and other services is not new.  It is old.  It is how things used to be done.  It failed miserably.  The idea that private services operate fairly and that philanthropy, charity and voluntarism can deliver a fair society belongs in the past along with its workhouses and its pauper lists.
The Welfare State rose out of the failure of this approach, to ensure that through our contributions in tax and national insurance, every citizen was guaranteed access to healthcare, education and all the other supporting elements of the social contract.  If this was breached, the electorate could hold those offices of state to account.  Not so in 2012.  So, it seems, we are called to repeat history and take back the services which we all need, out of the hands of private interests, and into the hands of those with a stake in the public interest.
Get Involved
Join Residents of Barnet to protest Capita’s ever growing slice of the Council Budget – here
Keep up to speed on the latest sell offs at Corporate Watch – here
Organisations to watch:

[1] All figures and information in this section sourced from: http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/pages/our-history.aspx
Capita and the Outsourcerers: Poof! Goes the Welfare State | Occupy News Network

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