Monday 19 September 2011

Barnet Council Exclusive - Confidential legal advice - disadvantages of outsourcing

nThis document is something you are not meant to see. It is confidential legal advice, prepared for Barnet Council, which discusses the risks associated with outsourcing, compared with keeping in house.

The risks of keeping it in house? They can't gamble with your money so easily. The other risk? The council keeps the risk. Isn't that what Dan Thomas said happened in the clip of the Council, which you can watch in the sidebar, when the service was outsourced. Plain bonkers.

1 comment:

Jaybird said...

I think the experiences of AssetCo, the company which owns London & Lincolnshire's fire engines and is currently on the brink of administration/ winding up, and also Southern Cross, the residential care homes provider asset stripped by previous owners, shows that, whatever you think you are doing you cannot outsource risk for lots of public services.

The only thing you can do is outsource control of the risk, which seems to me a pretty frightening thing to do.

Barnet may think they have learned lessons of their own personal outsourcing disasters like Catalyst or MetPro or SAP, but they do not seem to have considered the wider lessons of, for example Southern Cross.

They seem to rely on size of the potential contractors as a method of reducing risk of, for example, insolvency. Southern Cross shows that size is not everything.