Austerity, political control and supplier selection in English local government: implications for autonomy in multi-level systems

Eckersley, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9048-8529, Flynn, A, Ferry, L and Lakoma, K ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2583-3813, 2023. Austerity, political control and supplier selection in English local government: implications for autonomy in multi-level systems. Public Management Review, 25 (1), pp. 1-21. ISSN 1471-9037

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Abstract

Analysis of 60,000 contracts awarded by English councils between 2015-19 reveals that austerity constraints are a key predictor of councils outsourcing services to for-profit suppliers, regardless of their political control. Conservative Party-controlled councils are also more likely to contract with for-profit suppliers, although we found no link between Labour-controlled councils and not-for-profit suppliers, nor evidence that political or budgetary factors influence whether councils contract with providers based in their own region. We argue that centrally imposed funding cuts, and a belief that for-profit suppliers represent a cheaper option, could be overriding Labour Party councils’ ideological preference for not-for-profit providers.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Public Management Review
Creators:	Eckersley, P., Flynn, A., Ferry, L. and Lakoma, K.
Publisher:	Routledge
Date:	January 2023
Volume:	25
Number:	1
ISSN:	1471-9037
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/14719037.2021.1930122 DOI 1436219 Other
Rights:	© 2021 the author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	06 May 2021 08:59
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 09:25
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42821

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