Dr Ruth Dixon and Professor Christopher Hood quoted on whether outsourcing costs governments more

Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon were quoted in an article for the Guardian (27 May) entitled 'Outsourcing can often increase public service costs, not cut them' that draws heavily on their book 'A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less'.

The article says, "Now here is a study comparing the running cost of government over 35 years with – a crude but significant measure – satisfaction with public services. If new public management worked, then costs must surely have fallen while satisfaction rose. Amazingly, you can't do the sum, at least not reliably. That's because governments kept chopping and changing and sometimes not even bothering to collect the relevant figures. Even the basic data needed to assess performance is lacking [...]

Painstakingly, by quizzing civil servants and popping in FoI requests, Chris Hood and his colleague Ruth Dixon have joined disparate data series, recalculating backwards and filling in the gaps with guesstimates. They show that over the past 30 years, the running costs of central government have risen, and as far as we know they have for councils too."

The full article can be read here: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/27/outsourcing-increase-costs-public-services