Not-for-profit providers and social enterprises make up a significant proportion of the public service economy, but given timing constraints, it was decided to confine the project to the for-profit sector, in particular the providers of complex services.
The author conducted 78 interviews over four weeks in October and November 2016, most of them with the executives of 24 large and medium-sized providers and four advisory firms involved in the UK public service economy. These included 12 current and two former chief executives and 20 current and former senior executives. Three of the companies were selected to interview more junior personnel responsible for bidding and operations, commercial and financial control. Seventeen of the private executives had worked in government, in the UK or overseas, earlier in their careers.
Seven current and former civil servants were interviewed, four of whom have or have had high level responsibility for procurement and contract management. Approaches were made to a broader range of public officials, but it proved difficult to obtain access in the time available, and it was recognised that, as serving public officials, they would have been constrained in what they could have said. Conversations were also held with four former ministerial advisers, one member of parliament and a union leader, all with long-term engagement with the industry. (A number of women executives and officials were interviewed, but to ensure anonymity, masculine pronouns have been used throughout this report.)
This is not a representative sample, but the author was able to have frank off-the-record conversations with senior executives across a range of different enterprises with different service offerings and different business models.
As a result, the report provides rare insights into the attitudes and the experiences of senior executives of the industry, most of them with long experience in the sector. A number of survey participants were extremely frank about the financial position of their companies and the mistakes they had made over the past few years. Some of these sentiments have no doubt been expressed to government at different times, but if so, they have not been made public.
The author also studied dozens of NAO and other government reports on procurement and contract management going back to the early 1990s. Apart from the resources available online, he was able to draw on his own archives of government reviews in which he participated and meetings he attended over the period 1995 to 2011.