The Impact of Compulsory Competitive Tendering

Abstract

Of all the changes introduced by the 1979–97 Conservative Governments, perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching were those associated with compulsory competitive tendering (CCT). Successive legislative enactments forced local authorities to put specified services out to competitive tender on terms and time-scales established by the centre. In many cases, as we shall see, the tenders were won not by private companies but by in-house bids from a council’s own workforce. But the very acts of putting together a tender document and drawing up and monitoring contracts produce profound changes in the internal management and operation of an authority — sufficiently profound in our view for CCT to justify a chapter in its own right.