Is the government looking to privatise the UK state sector?
The coalition government is this weekend standing accused of looking to privatise various areas of the UK state sector without officially confirming this. Only a few days ago we saw the proposed sale of a NHS recruitment company which is state-owned and supplies staff to a great number of hospital trusts around the UK. Only last week we also saw the proposed abolition of the Audit Commission in favour of private one-off investigations, carried out by private sector companies, on the half of individual local authorities. There have also been other instances of private sector involvement in what are officially public sector projects and services.
There's no doubt that the UK government would prefer to transfer over a large amount of public-sector work to the private sector in order to potentially improve efficiencies and reduce the liabilities of the UK state in the short to medium term. However, when you consider that over half of those employed in the UK are directly or indirectly employed by the state then perhaps this is not the time to be pushing for the private sector to become more involved in the public sector?
Many believe that the Liberal Democrat side of the coalition government is holding the Conservative party back from a further transfer of power to the private sector. Whether this is the case in reality very much remains to be seen.
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