Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
On the one hand, we are told that this is a general permissive piece of legislation and that we cannot have too much prescription in it. However, now, I am being told that I have not been prescriptive enough with the amendments. Again, I am slightly baffled by the position that the minister and the Government are taking.
Let me go back to something that the minister told me about in-sourcing at stage 2. He said to me that it would have
“an unintended consequence”
and that:
“it would prevent the very businesses that we are trying to support locally from gaining contracts with public enterprises via public procurement.”—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee, 14 January 2026; c 44.]
However, what the issue is about is bringing services in-house to local public sector organisations. This is not about procurement. The beneficiaries of the contracts I mean are not local small and medium-sized enterprises, they are huge multinational corporations—Mitie, Serco, Sodexo, GEOAmey, Teleperformance, HC-One and Compass. The list goes on.
Community wealth building is about the generation, circulation and retention of wealth in a local community. Those are all examples of extractive forms of business and capitalism that take—rob, even, albeit it is legalised robbery—money out of local economies and off of local communities. These amendments are designed to point to a better way. I press amendment 1.