Who Really Runs Britain?: The Private Companies Taking Control of Benefits, Prisons, Asylum, Deportation, Security, Social Care and the NHS

Who do you think is running our prisons, providing healthcare, transport, legal aid and child protection? You might think it has to be the government, but in reality £80 billion of public money is given every year to private companies to handle some of our most sensitive and important services. These organizations have been handed enormous amounts of power and yet for the most part they operate with no transparency or accountability. Award-winning journalist Alan White exposes what goes wrong when the invisible hand of the market is introduced into public services. Informed by interviews with senior managers, campaigners and whistle-blowers, as well as with the companies in question, Who Really Runs Britain? is the first book to deal with government outsourcing, giving the full story behind scandals involving G4S, Serco and ATOS, and revealing system failure in areas such as social care, welfare and justice. The picture that develops is deeply troubling.