Austerity will lead to further government outsourcing, but key lessons need to be learnt to avoid the mistakes of the past

The UK government spends nearly £700 billion annually, with over £160 billion of this going to procurement. Even before the coalition’s current campaign of public sector spending cuts, attention had moved to how to reduce this amount. Leslie Willcocks finds that while modern solutions such as shared services and cloud computing may look like easy sources of savings to civil servants and politicians, the Achilles heel of large-scale outsourcing in the UK public sector is most likely to be – as it has always been – a lack of investment in the in-house management capabilities needed to shape procurement strategy and service delivery.