To him had fallen the task of touring the country telling localities of the need to find £20bn of savings by working more smartly, including greater outsourcing.
Greater outsourcing will deliver resource efficiencies and redeployment opportunities which will help protect frontline services, the thinktank Policy Exchange has said.
Lower growth but greater outsourcing, rising competition from China and the spiraling cost of staying at the technological forefront, he says, are impelling industry leaders to reconsider their approach to the business.
A hiring freeze also could mean greater outsourcing to private contractors that might end up costing taxpayers more money, not less.
India is outsourcing outsourcing.
By that time, New Labour had loosed the second great wave of outsourcing across Britain's public services – although now under a rubric of improving choice and value for money for citizens, rather than the overt Thatcherite goal of dismantling the state.
The arrival of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition unleashed Britain's third great wave of outsourcing since the 1980s – between 2010 and 2015, the industry doubled in size from £64bn a year to £120bn as new health, probation and benefit services hit the market – but many of Serco's new contracts were hastily designed and bid for, and barely breaking even.
Still, the prospect of improved equipment hasn't stopped commentators from viewing the plane as a mirror in which we can see everything from the decline of American innovation to the possible sins of our ever-greater reliance on outsourcing.
Russia, in particular, may "demand that the United States acknowledge a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union," says Stratfor, a consultancy based in Texas.Aspiring great powers never "outsource security", laments Bharat Karnad of Delhi's Centre for Policy Research in Mint, an Indian newspaper.
He envisions more layoffs and production cuts and a greater reliance on outsourcing.
