The ‘open public services’ agenda is unravelling and this should change how we perceive those who claim to critique it from the inside while nonetheless supporting its aims

In this response to an earlier article by Jane Mansour, Peter Latham critiques the ‘open public services’ agenda upon which her arguments were predicated. He suggests that the purported localism of this approach is illusory, in fact affording new powers to central government to dictate how ‘localism’ will work in practice and further eroding the status of local councils. With a view to the broader context within which the policy specifics of commissioning are played out, he claims that the relevance of the ‘critical insider’ adopted by Mansour and others is increasingly in question.