Hedge fund SRM, the biggest Northern Rock shareholder with an 11.5% stake, and one of the parties to the legal action, asked the Treasury for: criteria used to evaluate private sector bids for Northern Rock; information on the decision to take the bank into public ownership; and a copy of the Goldman Sachs report on financial restructuring options.
UK law currently prevents public sector bids for rail franchises.
Now, with Mexico's recent energy reform, private companies will participate in exploration and production for the first time in more than 75 years, and CFE (the country's electric utility) is seeking private-sector bids for natural-gas pipelines in northern Mexico that are expected to cost $2.25 billion.
Leon Ward, a trustee at charities Plan UK and Brook welcomes this idea but worries there isn't enough support in the sector: "There has to be some focus on building capacity in the sector to bid for and successfully implement these contracts.
Critics argue that letting public sector organisations bid for franchises will solve little, as it will require public money to be spent in the expensive tendering process, with no guarantee of success.
They wrote: "We are concerned about the government's proposed secondary legislation (under Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act) to force virtually every part of the English NHS to be opened up to the private sector to bid for its contracts.
On Friday, more than 1,000 doctors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph claiming the rules, under section 75 of the act, would "force virtually every part of the English NHS to be opened up to the private sector to bid for its contracts".
"We are now at the stage of doing the drilling for exploration wells," the information from which will be used to attract private sector bids, he said.
This approach can be traced back at least as far as the City Challenge programme launched by then environment secretary Michael Heseltine in 1990, which brought together local government and the private sector in bids for economic and environmental projects.
There was a huge amount of suspicion, mistrust and poor connotation attached to the security business at that time". In a world where everything is contracted out, however, big security contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq mean the private security sector is bidding for respectability.
