The ministry has signed a 15-year contract with AWE, the consortium which already operates the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, where nuclear warheads are designed and maintained. Additional contracts have been signed with Babcock and Lockheed Martin, part of a new consortium to be known as the ABL Alliance.
"History is littered with outsourcing deals that either or both parties eventually find constraining and/or, in practice, more expensive," said the Royal United Services Institute report. "After the G4S and Olympics episode, the privatisation of the railways is the most obvious example of this, but there are many others."
It said the outsourcing plan suffered "from an inherent weakness, since it appears to rest on an argument that, because the government is not very good at negotiating and managing contracts with the private sector, it is going to negotiate an even bigger contract with a private-sector entity to undertake the entire task on its behalf. Persuasive arguments against this logic need to be marshalled."
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