In the early days of the pandemic, some commentators were suggesting that the immediacy and the severity of the crisis would force the UK government away from its instinctive neoliberal policy prescriptions.

And certainly the furlough scheme and the scale of government spending to maintain employment did seem to vindicate that view to an extent.

But when it came to dealing with the

COVID-19 pandemic itself, as you described in the article that you wrote for the New York

Review of Books, the government has favoured outsourcing and giving contracts to private service

providers. So could you say something on the scale of that outsourcing and what the consequences

have been? Yeah, the government went for private sector options every single time.

And I think that's just because that's where its instincts are.

That's where it will look to.

That's where its ideology lies.

So, you know, we don't really know the scale of it because the full amount is not

disclosed. We know that £1.7 billion in contracts have been disclosed, but the full details

have not and might never be published. But I think what happened was across the country,

more and more people in the public health sector, local authorities, non-profit sector, universities.

We're looking at this.

And at first they were thinking, well, we don't really know why they're not using us,

but I guess they must have a reason yeah right

maybe they've got some higher purpose that we don't know about right people you

know there were people who didn't automatically assume the worst so we're

prepared to believe that there was a plan and that it just hadn't revealed itself

yet but but as things went on you could see that the public sector was basically, it was just bypassed.

And I think that happens when and because you're not particularly interested in the public sector.

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