Contract plays a vitally important role in the delivery of public services today. Both central and local governments make extensive use of private firms to provide facilities, goods, and services. Government contracts vary considerably from the relatively straightforward competitive procurement of office supplies, to complex, long-term arrangements in which the contractor researches and develops a new piece of military equipment, or builds and provides a fully-serviced hospital over a thirty-year period.

English law's traditional approach to government contracts has been to regard...