There is a building in every town that nobody fully understands anymore. The primary school whose boiler has been making the same complaint since 1979. The leisure centre where the pool plant room is laid out in a sequence that the current contractor reads as a diagram of grievance. The crematorium with the second flue that has to be opened by hand before the first one will draw. Somebody used to know. That person is not on the rota.

The British caretaker was a category of worker the country abolished in stages without ever quite announcing it. The Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 opened the first crack, requiring construction and maintenance work above a threshold to be put out to competitive tender. The Local Government Act 1988 then extended compulsory competitive tendering to refuse collection, ground maintenance, school catering, cleaning, and the broad band of manual services that had previously belonged to a building. A phased extension from 1994 brought white-collar professional services into the regime too, and by the late 1990s private provision of locally managed services had crossed the line from minority to majority. Labour announced Best Value as the replacement in 1997, but by then the structural change was done.

What the legislation moved off the council books was a particular form of knowledge. The school caretaker who had been in post for twenty-three years did not own a manual. He held, in the muscles of his hands and the maps in his head, the things that no clerk of works had thought worth writing down. Which radiator never bled properly. The exact angle the side gate had to be lifted at to clear the warped paving. Which corner of the gym roof leaked when the wind came from the north-east. The names of the kids whose parents would be at the door if any rumour reached home. None of it had a line item.

The contracting model assumed that buildings could be described, and that the description was the building. A schedule of maintenance, a frequency of inspection, a key performance indicator on response time. What the schedule could not include was the gradient of forty years of small adjustments, each one a response to a thing that had gone wrong once and been quietly compensated for ever since. When the contract changed hands, which it did, and again, the new team inherited the building stripped of its annotation. They were paid to handle tickets, not to know.

The result is the slow administrative haunting that anyone who works in a public building now recognises. The fire panel that beeps once every fourteen days and nobody is sure why. The cupboard nobody has the key to. The pipework above the staff toilet that drips during heavy rain and gets logged again every quarter as a new fault. These are not failures of maintenance, they are failures of inheritance. The building still works. The person who knew how it worked has been gone for a decade, and his replacement was billed by the hour.

It is tempting to read this as a story about money, and partly it is. The Institute for Government's review of outsourcing finds that early savings often eroded as contracts matured, which sounds like an accounting note and reads, on the ground, like a generation of caretakers retiring without anyone shadowing them. The quieter story is what happens to a country when the people who knew where the stopcock was are replaced by a number to call. The buildings keep standing. The knowledge does not transfer.

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