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Married to Night Train
- Location
- Salford, UK
Every local authority I have heard of that outsourced their IT departments have ended up paying extra to cancel the contract and bring IT back in house. Private company strictly provide only x,y,z services, but any new requirements and they charge very steeply on top of the agreement, thus rendering any savings lost.
It's a tiny scale, but where I work at the Environment Centre, they had a contract with a cleaning company. A cleaner came in twice a week for a couple of hours. It was expensive, and the manager wasn't especially happy with the standard of the work, or the security (alarm codes written on bits of paper etc). So they got out of the contract (apparently at no cost, somehow), and now employ me and a colleague for less than the contract price, to work a total of 6 hours a week spread over 4 days. More frequent cleaning makes it easier, and better, and also we have a relationship with the building and organisation that makes us care about the job.