Abstract
This chapter outlines how marketization has been driving public service delivery in England since the late 1970s in efforts to increase competition and enhance service quality. We chart the enduring legacy of Compulsory Competitive Tendering which was introduced in the 1980s to ensure that a competitive process was followed by local authorities in public service procurement. We also highlight policy responses to CCT in the 1990s, such as Strategic Commissioning, which permitted other non-governmental actors to become involved in public service delivery. While our findings show that non-governmental actors increasingly carry out parks maintenance, this is not reflected in the distribution of the budgets, which continue to be dominated by in-house local authority providers and private contractors. This chapter therefore provides new evidence of the shifts in parks and roads maintenance in England towards shared responsibilities between different combinations of local authorities, private, third sector and voluntary actors.
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Notes
- 1.
Amey is a subsidiary of Spanish company Grupo Ferrovial, S.A.
- 2.
In Birmingham, the council attempted to invoke penalty clauses in contract as it was not satisfied with the quality of repairs and road resurfacing work (Elkes 2016). In Sheffield, some residents have been protesting the felling of street trees as part of the Amey contract and in summer 2017, the council ‘obtained a high court injunction in an attempt to prevent protesters from standing in the way of tree-felling contractors’ (Halliday 2017).
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Dempsey, N., Burton, M., Selin, J. (2020). In-House, Contracted Out…or Something Else? Parks and Road Management in England. In: Lindholst, A., Hansen, M. (eds) Marketization in Local Government. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32478-0_5
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