The cost of privatisation.

Danthus

Danthus

Danthus

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5 Jun 2010
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I think we all knew this but the Independent has a feature on it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...vatising-british-public-services-9874048.html

Foreign governments are making hundreds of millions of pounds a year running British public services, according to an Independent investigation highlighting how privatisation is benefiting overseas – rather than UK – taxpayers.

Swathes of Britain’s energy, transport and utility networks are run by companies owned by other European governments – meaning foreign exchequers reap the dividends while UK customers struggle with increasing fares and bills.

In the past two years alone, overseas taxpayers have taken dividends totalling nearly £1bn from companies which make their profits from UK households and passengers.

The figures unearthed by The Independent in corporate filings will fuel calls for the Government to rethink its privatisation agenda – and boost those who argue that the railways should be opened up to publicly owned UK operators, or even renationalised.
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Foreign taxpayer-owned transport companies received £102m in dividends from UK train fares during the past two years, The Independent has calculated. That figure is dwarfed by the £900m sent back to foreign governments from British household energy bills. These came from dividends taken out of the UK by EDF, majority-owned by the French state, and the industrial energy supplier GDF Suez, part-owned by France.

Other foreign energy players are also taking huge dividends from UK electricity bills but are remitting them to private investors. For instance, Scottish Power’s Spanish owners Iberdrola took a £600m payment. With consumers paying an average of £410 more a year for energy compared with a decade ago, The Independent’s findings shine new light on the motivations of foreign energy suppliers.
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I don't see any realistic way of reversing the disaster that has been privatisation.
 
Most privatisation has been critical to the success of the UK economy. However, undoubtedly there is an argument that other areas, railways, energy, water hasn't worked for a number of reasons.
 
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Openreach do a good job of continuing their nationalised approach to "service". They're a good example of a how important it can be to break up a monopoly business.
 
We sort of have ended up buying it all back, at least as far as the railways are concerned.

Being a political pawn isn't any way to run a vital piece of infrastructure, but then again neither is selling it off to be stripped of all valuable assets and then abandoned.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Are you old enough to remember how these industries ran when they were nationalised?
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I think we're all old enough to remember when the Royal Mail was sold off. In order make it attractive to buyers, the tax-payer took on £10bn of pension liabilities. The Royal Mail was then sold for £3.3bn.

There was a strong case for institutions like British Steel and British Telecom being sold off. Less so the railways and now the NHS.
 
The government owns Directly Operated Railways which runs the East Coast main line. Why can't they use this system to bid on these contracts, surely if everything is above board and they win some of them fairly there is no legal issue there?
 
Give it a decade or so but eventually there will no doubt be a lot of stuff leaked about the Royal Mail deal and how it was a George Osborne vote/support buying scam.
 
I would like them to fully nationalise everything so that when it fails the younger generation may finally see it for what it is. A monopoly that is run not for profit and has no incentive to please the customer or offer value for money.

Why not give the UK companies prefence when offering corrupt contracts for ex public services. Most of the UK public services were once private and either taken over by the state pushed out by the state. Most if not all public services started out as private. Private sector built the first roads and first doctors first trains first cars first farms and so on.
 
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Some of the posts in this thread are about as near sighted as privatisation policy is / has been.

There are good examples of publicly run businesses. There are good examples of non-profit businesses and social enterprise in the UK. Yet some people insist on equating private business with good for customer / public benefit, despite that being glaringly obvious nonsense.

The latest utter ******** being Post Office privatisation. Just because a national asset is poorly run, you don't sell it. And you certainly don't sell it on the cheap for the sole benefit of billionaires and those with big pension pots / investment portfolios.

Anyone who says otherwise is either myopic, deranged or on the wind up.

That's before we even get to the part about essential services being in back in private hands. It's just plain regressive.
 
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