Introduction

While the first stages of the implementation of the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) focused on those government-owned activities that required capital investment in infrastructure, the second wave of government preparation was in anticipation of the application of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) that came into effect in 1994. The Uruguay Round 1986–1994 was concerned with the extension of procurement into the liberalisation of public services and to other parts of government, including local government (Walsh, 1989). There was also some preparation to open these markets through the parallel development of the Single European Market (SEM) from 1985 that came into effect in 1992 (Cockfield, 1994). In the EU, the negotiation of the GATS was undertaken by the European Commission (EC) for member states, although each was an individual signatory of the agreement (Meunier, 2005). While these General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations had an external, international focus for world trade, they also informed the development of the SEM (Abbott, 1990).

The UK government prepared for the implementation of the GATS and the SEM by restructuring its institutional governance arrangements. It did this by separating policy making and ministerial responsibilities from services with a direct public interface, businesses or service providers (Haddon, 2012). This separation between policy and delivery led to distancing and deskilling within the civil service (Theakston, 1995; Rhodes, 2001). Preparations for liberalisation took both practical and cultural approaches. The practical steps included a gradual approach to preparing government delivery services for potential exposure to competition (Pliatzky, 1992). This was accompanied by a change in the cultural narrative of the public sector's role and abilities to undertake its work by moving away from the assumption that public services can only be delivered by public service providers. This was a major challenge, as Margaret Thatcher found (Marsh, 1991). By her second term in office, 1983–1987, the costs of government had increased rather than reduced and it was proving very difficult to wean the public away from expectations of public services and the ways in which they were to be delivered (Fry, 1988).