Local government figures have welcomed moves by Barnet LBC to ‘shine a light' on outsourcing by publishing a controversial contract online.

The London borough took the unprecedented step on 19 September of releasing the first of its ‘One Barnet' contracts with Capita online.

The contract covered its agreement to provide back office services and is designed to save local taxpayers more than £165m over 10 years.

A copy of another contract with Capita to provide development and regulatory services will be published online next month.

‘Anything that shines a light on all aspects of a contract from the outset must be a good thing,' said the chief executive of the Association of Public Service Excellence,
Paul O'Brien.

‘It could help avoid misunderstandings further down the lifetime of the contract.  Certainly a number of the issues that have complicated outsourcing contracts over the last decade have been the difficulties of ensuring appropriate governance and scrutiny of them.'

Although Mr O'Brien added such a document ‘might scare the living daylights' out of third sector groups thinking about bidding for local government contracts ‘when they see the complexity and all the information available'.

New Local Government Network director Simon Parker said: ‘One of the big problems with the debate on outsourcing is that we simply don't have enough performance information in the public realm to be able to judge how good the private sector is.  This means that the debate about the role of partnerships is dominated by anecdotes rather than hard evidence.

‘So the fact that Barnet is publishing this contract is a really positive move in the direction of transparency,' added Mr Parker.  ‘I hope more commercial providers will take up this challenge and share their information with the public.'