Examining the Effectiveness of Current Information Laws and Implementation Practices for Accountability of Outsourced Public Services

Recent events linked to outsourcing such as the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017 and the collapse of Carillion in 2018 have again highlighted the challenges of maintaining democratic accountability of government expenditure where public services are contracted out to private companies. Although not the only focus of policy debate, pressure is building from both parliamentarians and the Information Regulator to extend UK information laws to the rapidly expanding number of private companies holding major public sector contracts. However, there remains a lack of evidence as to the nature and extent of this accountability gap and the implications for legislative reform. This article presents findings on non-compliance from a comprehensive field experiment using Freedom of Information requests on the Private Finance Initiative model of outsourcing. We demonstrate the limits of Freedom of Information as a tool for accountability and argue both legislative and regulatory reform are needed to enable proper public scrutiny of outsourced public services.