Public sector outsourcing, the contract culture and the myth of the regulatory State

Hamerton, Christopher and Hobbs, Suzanne (2022) Public sector outsourcing, the contract culture and the myth of the regulatory State. In, Privatising Criminal Justice: History, Neoliberal Penality and the Commodification of Crime. 1st ed. Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 86-106. (doi:10.4324/9781315709819-5).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors debate the emergence of the regulatory State and the systemic flaws in the regulatory apparatus exposed by incidents of malfeasance, disasters and scandals. The chapter explores how the privatisation and market imperatives have increasingly become associated with the loss of transparency and good governance, poor performance, corner-cutting, lax contract scrutiny and oversight, malpractice, negligence and on occasions culpable criminality. In this section, the authors explore how the expansion of privatisation has given rise to a plethora of regulatory bodies, leading some to argue that the Welfare State has been replaced with the regulatory State. Despite this, the authors argue that as the boundaries between the public and the private sector have become increasingly permeable, the regulatory State has incrementally conceded its authority to commercial interests. As a powerful new public-sector oligopoly of multi-national private contractors has emerged and governments have become increasingly dependent upon them, the ‘too big to fail’ companies have exploited for profit the systemic fault lines.

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