Providers have found it difficult to understand what has been happening at a market level, in part because they have only limited ways of conversing with their competitors. When the author spoke about these issues in the BSA's annual lecture in mid-2016, the response of the audience was 'Thank goodness someone is speaking publicly about these things'. This was possible, in part, because the author is an outsider - he is no longer involved in the industry and he no longer lives in the UK. This review is based on the same formula - a trusted outsider has met with a number of different providers one-on-one, making it easier for them to speak about their individual experiences.
Structured conversations can take place amongst commercial rivals without infringing the bounds of law or propriety - the author has participated in a number of such conversations over the years - but company executives find it extremely difficult to speak in any detail about their business models, or to acknowledge their mistakes, in front of their competitors.
There are ways of overcoming these barriers. Building on personal relationships of trust and the disinterestedness of sound academic research, KPMG and University College London (UCL) constructed a data club around 2009, to compare the performance of cleaning services in different hospitals. Operating bilaterally through a trusted middleman, public and private suppliers provided detailed information about their own performance, which was anonymised, analysed and published. Each participant was given a code by which they could identify their own services and compare themselves against the industry norm.
Public service providers might engage one-on-one with trusted intermediaries through anonymous and independent structures and processes, to construct a more finely-grained analysis of particular market sectors or large-scale procurements.
Some government inquiries have learned a great deal about the operation of the market by engaging closely with industry. A review in long-term capacity planning, conducted in 2002-03 for the Office of Government Commerce by Christopher Kelly, a former permanent secretary in the Department of Health, is one such example.115 The review of the public service sector, conducted by Dr DeAnne Julius in 2007 on behalf of the Business Secretary, is another.116
The advantages of such information to government are obvious, but individual providers would also benefit from a disinterested and balanced account of market conditions.