Mr. Ivan Cooper:

This is in our submission. The competition issue is related to the fact that funding Departments are increasingly putting services out to tender. There are several cases where services traditionally delivered by community and voluntary organisations at local level over decades were put out to tender and contracts were awarded to private firms to deliver those services. The funding is lost to the public benefit community. The assets move from the public into the private sector. If community and voluntary organisations receive funding to deliver those services, they must sign a very detailed service level agreement and contract that are highly specific about what they can and cannot do with the resources, whereas private sector firms are simply awarded a commercial contract that is much more straightforward. The playing field is considered to be uneven and community and voluntary organisations are put at a disadvantage in taking part in the process. The assets, volunteerism and community connectedness that they bring to services are lost if services are awarded to private firms to deliver contracts. If, for example, a private firm decides that it is not interested in renewing a contract at some point in the future, the capacity of the community to ensure that a service continues to be available locally is removed. There is a series of strategic questions that we need to consider before making a wholesale rush to put everything up for competitive tendering without adequate consideration of the long-run consequences for communities.