MPs to debate government outsourcing

A Westminster debate tomorrow (29) will hear from MPs on outsourcing in government departments, highlighting some of our ongoing facilities management disputes and the deep-rooted issues with outsourcing.

The debate, which will take place on 29 January from 9.30am until 11am, was secured by Andy McDonald MP, who is a member of the PCS parliamentary group. You can watch it on Parliament TV from 9.30am. 

It is expected that a number of MPs will highlight our ongoing disputes with facilities management outsourced contractors G4S, ISS and OCS across government departments and reinforce their support for our calls for insourcing in line with a promise in the Labour manifesto.

This much-needed debate comes against a backdrop of resistance by PCS members in facilities management. Hundreds of PCS members in various roles – catering, cleaning, maintenance, post room, portering, reception, and security – are currently taking strike action across a range of contracts in several government departments and agencies.

They are striking, or due to strike, due to the unacceptable and derisory pay offers they have received from highly profitable multinational private firms. These disputes have highlighted the deep-rooted issues with outsourcing. 

Our members in facilities management have inferior pay, terms and conditions to those colleagues on civil servant contracts – and the gap is ever widening. 

This blatantly unfair two-tier workforce is also defined by poor terms and conditions. Since they do not receive access to company sick pay from day one, outsourced workers are constantly forced to attend work while sick as they cannot afford to take time off.

As those on such outsourced contracts are disproportionately Black, Asian and minority ethnic and migrant workers (while civil servants are mostly white), outsourcing has also produced institutionally racist outcomes.

What needs to be done

Prior to the 2024 general election, Labour promised in its New Deal for Working People document, referred to in its manifesto, that “Labour will end the presumption in favour of outsourcing and oversee the biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation”.

The commitment to the “biggest wave of insourcing for a generation” has been given by both the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and by chancellor Rachel Reeves. 

Labour also promised in that document and in its manifesto to strengthen rights to sick pay from day one. PCS believes ministers cannot make this case effectively while many of their own departments and agencies have workers who are denied contractual sick pay from day one.

We continue to call on ministers to intervene in these disputes so that all of their own workforce has access to basic rights like sick pay. But the only long-term solution to the failures of the outsourcing model is to bring contracts back in-house.

Insourcing would deliver a better value for money for the taxpayer, end the institutionally racist two-tier structure and strengthen trade union rights for facilities management staff.