How do we know that the money we collectively give to our governments is being properly spent? We don't. A new campaign seeks to change that.
Commercial outsourcers fail and fail again. Privatisation hurtles on. The Public Accounts Committee has been interrogating executives and civil servants about the degradation of asylum housing in England.
The horrible death of Canadian Alois Dvorzac in UK immigration detention was big news. What if he'd been from Eritrea or Zaire?
In England and Wales the probation service works. The Coalition government is privatising it anyway, at speed. A former probation officer assesses an oversight committee's anxious report on government plans.
A shocking report on Harmondsworth, the British immigration lock-up run by GEO, America's second biggest prisons contractor. Who are the GEO Group and what do they stand for?
UK spending watchdog confirms mismanagement in outsourcing to G4S and Serco. Report casts doubt on public servants' ability to scrutinise powerful contractors.
British outsourcers cheated taxpayers out of tens of millions of pounds. Yesterday they said sorry. So that's all right, then.
Two outsourcing giants who tagged and monitored ex-offenders charged British taxpayers tens of millions of pounds for doing nothing. A new report reveals flagrant and systematic abuses, ahead of executives' interrogation by Members of Parliament today.
It's Britain's leading meter-reader. But in the homes it provides for asylum seekers, outsourcing giant G4S leaves energy bills unpaid.
While a company executive assured the UK Parliament there was nothing to worry about, a child in a G4S house counted rats.
'Putting victims first' — that's the government line. The UK's largest civil service union interrogates justice privatisation.
Guards, we are told, have "engaged in sexual activity with a detainee" at Yarl's Wood, the Home Office immigration jail in Bedfordshire. (Trigger warning: includes account of an incident of rape. The link from ‘taxi ads’ contains a potentially distressing image.)