A few years ago I attended a civil service briefing for journalists and stakeholders in a government department in Whitehall. The laptop computer driving the projector – which was to illustrate the theme of the briefing with a series of persuasive graphs and charts – was faulty. After 15 minutes of ineffective tinkering, the officials suggested we could go ahead without the slides. “Why not call IT, and get them to come and fix it?”, I asked. Alas, that was impossible, I was sheepishly told. Under the terms of the department’s outsourced IT maintenance contract, staff were allowed 30 repair calls a month. Any calls fulfilled by the private IT firm after that would be charged for at a massive premium. The department could not countenance that extra cost in an era of shrinking budgets. So laptops didn’t always get fixed. A minor irritation in the great scheme of things, but a useful illustration in miniature of the pitfalls and paradoxes of the phenomenon of outsourced public services: cheaper doesn’t always mean more efficient; leaner doesn’t automatically mean more effective; and the contract is king.

‘What matters is what works’ was for some years a voguish rallying cry for those arguing for the privatisation of public services. It’s an oddly disinterested phrase, one that suggests that the speaker doesn’t care either way who provides the service, although in practice it almost invariably justifies a decision to introduce market disciplines into the welfare state, be it the NHS, older people’s care, social security benefits assessments, probation services or even child protection. Privatisation, the enthusiasts proposed, was a matter of managerial common sense and organisational logic, rather than ideological preference. They bought wholesale the great claim of the silver-tongued outsourcers that ‘contracting out’ to private firms would be intrinsically more dynamic and efficient than leaving services with entrenched and hidebound state-run providers. Private firms would be more nimble, dynamic, and more innovative. A wave of the magic wand of market discipline would transform these moribund services, make them cheaper, better, more efficient.

Of course, state-run services need regular renewal. Without challenge and change they can be monolithic and ponderous, hiding unresponsive and unsafe services behind a flag of public sector virtue. All organisations can become complacent, and ineffective, stifling staff ingenuity and crucially losing focus on the needs of service users.

Is there a more vivid depiction of acute poverty than the terrifying food-bank scene in Ken Loach's award-winning drama I, Daniel Blake? One of the protagonists, a penniless and starving single mum, tears open a can of baked beans and in a frenzy of hunger stuffs the contents into her mouth with her fingers. This moment of acute desperation is where people end up, the film suggests, when you not only rip apart the social security safety net but also leave the vulnerable individuals who then fall through it precariously reliant on charity handouts to survive.

The food bank was a perfect location for Loach's film; it is emblematic of political and economic changes in the UK over the past decade. Most people had never heard of food banks in Britain in 2009; now there are thousands, all over the country. Food banks have been absorbed into mainstream political and cultural discourse as a kind of shorthand for poverty, the consequences of austerity and the punitive nature of neoliberal social security reform. There was widespread shock when the UK's biggest food-bank network, The Trussell Trust, began rapidly expanding at the beginning of this decade; ironic quips about food banks being a ‘growth industry’ in a time of recession mingled with incredulity and embarrassment that so many people in one of the world's wealthiest countries went hungry because they were too poor to feed themselves and their families.

Arguably, the initial shock at the rise of food banks in the UK (they have been around for much longer in Canada and the US) has subsided. It is entirely possible that, in media terms, we have reached a point of ‘peak food bank’. The appetite for news reports from the food charity frontline has diminished through repetition; how often, after all, can you keep telling the same awful story? Similarly, public outrage at the revelations of The Trussell Trust's annual audits (which, after early double-digit increases, show the volume of food given out each year to be roughly stabilising at enough to feed more than 1.1 million people) has faded slightly. As The Trussell Trust pointed out in 2016, there is a danger that reliance on food charity has become the ‘new normal’.