Terry Philpot’s timely article (“Profits before people”, 18 April) exposes the corrosive nature of the outgoing government’s wholesale privatisation of public services. Yes, there is a need to foster greater diversity of provision in responding to the needs of the most vulnerable within our communities. But Philpot rightly highlights the shocking lack of civic accountability for major service failures, the absence of any moral regard for the impact on those most directly affected and the brazen take up by many such providers of wholly unmerited awards for such failures. He also identified the wilful destruction of a public and successful probation service as indicative of this baleful trend. In 2007, at the centenary service of the probation service, The Bishop of