Do We No Longer 'Run' Our Own Councils?

Not if East Riding of Yorkshire Council and Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council are examples, whereby certain administrative services have been 'outsourced' to a German company Arvato, which in turn is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann.

At Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council what has been 'outsourced' includes Customer Services, Revenues Services, Benefits Services, Payroll Services, Accounts Payable, Pensions Administration, Transactional HR Services, ICT Services and Transformation & Change Services. It is also a fact that 450 former council employees have transferred their employment to this German company.

This situation, whereby a foreign company can 'control' various administrative functions, has been 'permitted' under the EU 'open market' policy. This is a means of enforcing the handover of large parts of national and local administration to supra-national companies - with no particular loyalty to the country in which their operations take place - and can be viewed as a ploy by the EU to further undermine the democracy of a nation state. It is, therefore, another form of 'power-grab' on a breathtaking scale and one that, to my knowledge, has received little or no publicity.