The changing regulation of public leisure provision

Abstract

There is much current international interest in the effectiveness, efficiency and economy of alternative mechanisms of public service delivery. In the UK, research has concentrated on Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), both in terms of its impacts and the wider socio-political project which it represents. It has been argued that CCT has been less about getting the private sector into public leisure provision than it has about commercializing the public sector. However, it is evident that the ‘externalization’ of public leisure management functions has been encouraged by the legislation, meaning that a new marketplace has been created, characterized by the emergence of a number of private sector leisure management companies. With the potential advent of a new Best Value (BV) regime in place of CCT, it is argued that the significance of these companies could increase considerably. Here, this new dynamic of private capital into public leisure provision is analysed, through reviewing its structural nature in the context of the wider social reproduction of capitalism. In locating the analysis within the field of Regulation Theory, the paper makes explicit the exogenous structural nature of the dynamic, particularly in its need for legitimation through the annexation of change through social norms, mechanisms and institutions. The paper consequently argues that while the primary project of CCT may have been about the commercialization of the public sector, the underlying priority of government has been much more associated with the need to find new and acceptable ways of reinforcing the hegemonic message of consumerbased capitalism. It is concluded that the BV regime, far from challenging this orthodoxy, is likely to further legitimate it.