Serco does our dirty work. It runs six British prisons and shuffles 24,000 prisoners a month between courts and jails. It mops up our hospitals and runs Yarl’s Wood and other immigration detention centres. Its binmen, meanwhile, hoist away the rubbish from 2.5 million British homes. And when Boris Johnson needed someone to stick a swab up our collective noses, of course it was Serco that won the Covid testing contract, pocketing £700 million from various types of pandemic-related work last year.
Now recession, we’re told, is looming — and straitened state coffers tend to trigger an outsourcing boom. Yet the market does not seem to have priced this in. The company, which, as ebullient chief executive Rupert Soames puts it, is “the pointy end