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The early impression given was that it did not matter how local authorities pursued BV provided that they delivered it in keeping with New Labour principles of avoiding ideological concerns about ownership (DETR, 1997). Unlike CCT, BV consequently promised to open up the range of management tools available to local government managements, albeit within the confines of the need to review the services they provided in accordance with the 'four Cs' of BV:

a requirement that obliged them to 'challenge' whether a service should continue to be provided;

to 'consult' users over its current and future shape and performance;

to 'compare' the service's current performance with that of similar services elsewhere;

and to subject the service to 'competition'.

The replacement of CCT with BV has consequently not involved a clear rejection of the 'public choice' assumptions that informed the former. Thus, not only does 'competition' remain but, in addition, the role that it plays within BV provides for forms of partial outsourcing to be utilized that go beyond the 'binary' options of either complete in-house or complete externalization decisions that were provided for within CCT. The BV review process, therefore, represents a continuation of the 'enabling' model of the local authority under which, while services are secured by local authorities, they are not necessarily provided by them directly.

The role of BV in promoting potentially greater external involvement, moreover, does not end with the prescriptive management tools to be used by management within the BV review process. Characteristic of the New Labour approach to public service reform is a lack of trust that, at the local level, reforms will be administered in line with the spirit, as well as the letter, of what is prescribed. As a result, local authority compliance with the '4Cs' of BV is the subject of external audit and inspection and the penalties for 'failing' an inspection can not only be very severe, but can themselves involve the externalization of service provision. As a result, service outsourcing effectively acts as a 'default' mechanism in the event that a local authority fails to embrace fully the objectives and methods of BV.

The introduction of BV has therefore increased the number of avenues through which the private sector can be involved in the delivery of public services and the range of situations in which staff can be transferred from public to private sector employment. Indeed BV can be argued to pose a greater threat to workers who wish to remain council employees than was the case under CCT. An argument which receives support from evidence showing that, at the level of 'partial transfer', it has enabled more externalization than CCT (Roper et al., 2005) and raises the likelihood that that the regime is leading to the types of negative effects on work intensification and job insecurity previously associated with CCT (Richardson et al., 2005).

However, some context is required. The environment within which BV operates is not directly comparable to CCT, in that it cannot straightforwardly be seen to provide a route for directly driving down workers' terms and conditions of employment through direct transfer to low-pay oriented contractors. Thus, while Labour have been criticized for their lack of enthusiasm in promoting collective (un本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。