MY UNION has joined forces with Unison to call on the government to end the scourge of outsourcing within our public services.

Public-sector outsourcing is a national scandal that has been privatising essential services throughout the country.

Taxpayers’ money is being used to increase the profits of wealthy corporations while workers and communities pay the price through worse jobs and services.

We are calling on the government to urgently agree a new people’s plan for insourcing, to end the exploitation of workers and ensure public services put people before profit.  

We agree that outsourcing, whereby services are farmed out to private providers at public great cost, results in a race to the bottom as these private agencies try to deliver services for less to increase their profits.

In reality, outsourcing is a form of hidden privatisation in which low-paid and vulnerable workers are exploited in the name of profit in what should be a public service. As a result, it is draining vast amounts of money from public services simply to generate huge profits skimmed off by greedy bosses of private firms.

This means that the money for insourcing is already there and it won’t cost any more to bring services in-house, pay proper rates of pay and give the public what it already pays for but better.

Despite a government election pledge to oversee “the biggest wave of insourcing for a generation,” our joint research has found that the value of outsourced contracts awarded or renewed for cleaning, catering and security and railway infrastructure reached £6.2 billion last year alone.

Our unions believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, indicating that the outsourcing of public-sector contracts is still widespread in areas such as health, local government and transport.

That is why we have launched Insource Now! a joint campaign calling for more public services to be brought back in-house rather than given to for-profit firms.

The new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has previously backed calls for more insourcing, and we say bring that commitment to public services across the country.

We have welcomed his pledge to put “life’s essentials back under stronger public control” and this provides an opportunity to deliver on Labour’s pledges to reverse public-sector outsourcing.

Millions of workers would want to see this Labour government deliver a full and urgent insourcing plan to begin the mass insourcing of public services before the next general election.

To get this done government departments and public bodies must work with unions to create a “people’s plan” to insource contracts as they expire or when break clauses arise.

We also want to see annual audits produced, alongside the autumn budget, to make clear how much profit is extracted from public services through outsourcing.

We must welcome the Cabinet Office’s recent guidance to central government departments to develop insourcing strategies and conduct public interest tests on all contracts as they expire as well as calls for this legislation to be extended across publicly funded and public-facing services as a matter of urgency.

The TUC and affiliates should be congratulated for the work already done on insourcing and we must continue to assist with supporting, co-ordinating and instigating insourcing campaign work.

At a stroke insourcing would help low-paid workers with the cost-of-living crisis and rebuild and reintegrate essential public services and give communities greater public control over those services.

Insourcing means better jobs for better services, it’s as simple as that.

Eddie Dempsey is general secretary of RMT.