Public sector outsourcing is the process of contracting out a service or a function to another body, such as street cleaning or internal IT services.
Over recent years considerations of outsourcing have gained added attention, driven by pressures on government budgets, perceptions of savings from its adoption and, in some cases, ideological views.
However, we argue in this NERI Research inBrief that considerations of outsourcing need to be grounded in a thorough assessment of the implications for the state of its adoption. Such assessments should be comprehensive, capturing immediate and longer term impacts, and framed using the Value For Money framework.
This edition of Research inBrief complements a recent research paper available here.