Jon Trickett: End the outsourcing racket – build it in Britain

The collapse of Carillion was a watershed moment. In a way that few other stories have managed to do, it cut through to the public to starkly reveal the government’s obsession with outsourcing. The National Audit Office has since highlighted that the Carillion collapse will cost taxpayers £148m. But the failure of one of the ‘companies that run Britain’ has deeper significance. It signals the failure of a wider economic model that sees privatising public services and boosting big business profits as a main source of growth.

Commitment to this was and is motivated by the belief that we shouldn’t manufacture here in the UK. This belief has driven the destruction of the UK’s industrial capacity, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the last decade alone, many of them secure and well-paid. The hardship that this ideologically-driven industrial decline has caused for working families throughout the country cannot be told by numbers alone. But it can and will be reversed under the next Labour government.

Our determination to ‘Build it in Britain’ will ensure a stronger future for industry with better jobs and opportunities in every part of the country, especially in those areas, like mine, long held back by successive governments. For too long politicians have sold the British people the lie that it’s better to let the market decide. Meanwhile, our governments have wilfully ignored industrial decline, at the same time as using the state to empower bankers and the finance sector – at the expense of all others, in particular manufacturing.

This raises fundamental questions about the structure of our economy and who benefits from it, which at the moment is primarily a small London-based elite and a network of wealthy investors who rarely pay their fair share. Labour is committed to transforming our economy, ensuring that the wealth of this nation is more equitably spread among the majority of people and across the many regions of the UK.

We believe that the state must help facilitate this process, bringing dynamism to our economy, putting money back into the pockets of workers and fuelling the tax revenues that fund our public services. It’s about politicians doing their job and ensuring our economy works for the many and not just an elite few, whom this government seems determined to provide with opportunity after opportunity, irrespective of past failures.

EU data shows that between 2014 and 2017 tens of millions of pounds worth of Network Rail contracts went, in part or in full, to overseas companies. In the same period, NHS contracts worth more than £1bn went, in part or in full, overseas, while the MoD dispatched £1.5bn worth of contracts to bidders from outside the UK. The list goes on. These were political choices embedded in a system we must change.

In May this year, Labour announced that if elected we will ensure that a £1bn contract to build three new frigates would stay in the UK. Only a month later, Theresa May labelled it an “enormous boost” for the UK economy that BAE had won a £20bn contract to build a new generation of Australian warships. Yet the thousands of jobs this contract will create will be located in Australia: their government had the common sense ours lacks to ensure this multi-billion pound deal benefits workers and not just shareholders.

Our Build it in Britain focus is guided by a three-pronged approach. We will change how government buys goods and services with new procurement rules so that we support jobs and industry in this country. We will match this with much-needed investment in our infrastructure and also in education, through our National Education Service. This will ensure that everyone, irrespective of background or age, will be able to develop the skills and knowledge needed to get on in life. Our strategy will also enable us to tackle climate change head on, by building the solar and wind farms that are necessary to transition to a green economy.

And let us be clear: we will not follow in the Tories’ footsteps by using EU laws as cover for the failure to develop a comprehensive industrial strategy. If necessary we would seek exemptions or clarifications from EU state aid and procurement rules as part of the Brexit negotiations to take further steps to support industry.

For too long we have witnessed the privatisation of profit and socialisation of risk. Radical change is needed now, and Labour’s plan to Build it in Britain will fundamentally transform our rigged economy once and for all.

Jon Trickett is shadow cabinet office minister.