The saga surrounding the Olympics and G4S may have placed the spotlight firmly on the use of private companies to protect the public, worried MI5, embarrassed the Home Office, and pleased and angered the armed forces in equal measure.
It is unlikely to persuade governments to back away from relying increasingly on the private sector to provide public services, even those directly responsible for the safety of its citizens and to fight on their behalf.
Far from it. More and more tasks will be "outsourced" as the rather euphemistic Whitehall phrase has it.
G4S, with an annual turnover of more than £7bn and worldwide contracts including in Iraq and Afghanistan, operates in what has been described by a Seymour Pierce analyst as "a golden age in outsourcing". Central and local government are spending £80bn on contracts with private companies a figure predicted to rise to £140bn in 2015.
Private contractors should be used "more systematically" in future, the defence secretary Philip Hammond told a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) conference on land warfare last month.
The Ministry of Defence is now planning to privatise the running of its Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) agency, a chronically inefficient body which has spent more than £500m on outside consultants over the past two years, but one that is crucially important for the armed forces. There was a case for turning the agency into a government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) body, Hammond said.
The hugely ambitious plan to double the size of the Reserves to 30,000 to make up for large cuts in the regular army also depends, as Hammond himself admits, on private sector employers to free up their workforce.
Ever since the Sandline affair in 1998 , with mercenaries helping to prop up the Sierre Leone government with the (private and secret) support of British officials, the Foreign Office has been grappling with the problem of how to regulate private security companies.
British military chiefs accept the growth of private security companies as inevitable (though some may have second thoughts after the Olympics).
The FO is now going along with the idea, unsurprisingly proposed by the companies, for a system of self-regulation based on an international code of conduct.
The growth, and expanding role, of private security companies raises serious issues of accountability. Their employees are often armed, they have been involved in the most serious violent incidents which have forced host governments such as Iraq and Afghanistan — rather than the governments where the companies are based — to impose controls on their activities.
Under existing proposals for self-regulation, "there will be no real sanction powers or democratic oversight. Such moves will not enable governments or communities to hold these companies to account", says War on Want.
It says the British government has already played a large role in the growth of this industry by endorsing its widespread use in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the three years 2007-2009 the industry earned £62.8m in contracts from the UK government.
Ruth Tanner, the charity's policy director, says: "The G4S Olympics scandal exposes the danger of the governments blind faith in the power of the market to deliver everything from policing to war.
Despite the ever present threat to human rights and security, successive governments have ducked imposing tough regulation on this industry. Instead the government is happy to let them police themselves.
Rather than leading the way in outsourcing wars...the British government must end the privatisation of war and hold these companies to account."
The International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers, an initiative driven by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swiss government is a start. But it is a wish list with no bite.
