To want to ban all outsourcing , tendering and rediscover the joys of institutional cohesion?

Zero hours contracts can have a place......people who only want to do a few hours BUT just using them to bypass decent contracts is morally wrong.
The rise of the Unions was an important step to ensuring employees were no longer seen as a disposable commodity - but I do not think we need to go back to the worse of the Union style excesses. Its all about balance - people should do a decent job, be dependable and trustworthy and be responsible AND so should an employer.

A rise in unions would be a good thing then, would it, nanaej? Back to the 70s...

I see a great big circle.. working conditions ( eg zero hours etc) getting so bad that there will be a rise in unions again...every cloud.....

Not unreasonable at all, although I see grammar schools as increasing social divisions.
I think many hospitals are forced to use agency nurses at great expense and the ridiculously generous terms offered to GPs by the last government mean that most out-of-hours care is done by agency locums (with fatal results in one case, when a doctor who had worked a full day abroad flew over in an exhausted condition).
Companies that have failed time and time again to deliver on-time, efficient services are still being awarded contracts. I detect a whiff of corruption. It's not what you know..............

On a good day, I trot off to John Lewis, where everyone working there is a partner - what is so wrong with that idea ? Grammar schools and apprenticeships and valued and valuable technical qualifications were not perfect but I still see the difference between the builders who did a 5 year apprenticeship . Just upset that America is held up as the perfect system - ours could be so much better ! Sorry again , I am going to get a soap box - and a mirror to yell at . In the private sector, I know folk are being sacked unless they take unpaid leave for sickness and holidays , zero hours contracts , please someone tell me why we don't scratch out the layer of management required to manage the layers of tendering and allow our institutions to function on decent inspired principles of fairness - or would that be too bigger leap for mankind ?

One of the main reasons for outsourcing, as well as the opportunity to pay people less, and have less pension liability, is transference of risk.
This means that instead of say a council being sued because a council employee has suffered an accident at work, liability will fall on the private company instead. Similarly, if an employee feels they have been unfairly dismissed, or discriminated against, it will be the private employer facing the tribunal and not the council.
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Ariadne I know that grammar schools are generally regarded as socially divisive, but is it also not the case that there was more social mobility in the fifties and sixties than there is now?

Classic case of this was my daughter's primary school (20 years ago). They had an excellent cook and well equipped kitchen producing very good 'from scratch' school lunches. Local authority decreed that it was shut down and centrally prepared food shipped in. Result was jobs lost, decent food lost, school lunches dropped by most children yet no overall monetary saving was made!! Bizarre!.

TUPE legislation is supposed to protect against such things tegan.
Bit mystified as to where grammar schools fit into the outsourcing picture. Also most nurses in the NHS work... for the NHS.

Yes, I have heard that, Tegan! And, in schools - academies usually, I think- teachers are being offered one year contracts only.

Aren't there cases of people losing their jobs when it has all gone to tender but being offered the job back at a much lower wage? And I'm sure that when maintenance on schools started going to private companies, the people employed were'nt as rigorously checked [police records etc] as they had been when working for the council?

I understand the points you are making, and agree with most of it. Private companies can only be out to make profit, surely, and at what cost? Maybe the powers that be have found that people with a real vocation, and a long term contract, were likely to be a nuisance and object to futile innovations?

However, one point that I'd like to make is that grammar schools themselves were a cause of social division. (I'm assuming that when you say "two tier" you meet private and state funded education and health care?)

Also has anyone made the connection between needing to impose a minimum wage and the growth of contract crazed firms trying to increase their bottom lines at the expense of lower paid staff ? I must get off my box now .

I agree; have heard that outsourcing was used for recruitment to territorial army - but it has failed to get the numbers . Quite remarkable that anyone would think it intelligent to bypass the experienced soldier as a recruitment tool and instead pay a recruitment agency !

Its a soap box that needs shouting from, do not apologise for your views. I too loathe the modern 'fashion' for outsourcing everything from prisoner care to elderly care - from child protection to cleaning streets. So many vital services are so divorced from the people they need to serve, and have simply become a matter of balancing the books and earning large profits for huge impersonal financial institutions.