How did they get away with privatising public services?

[Newname85]

Whoever thought it was a good idea to privatise rail services, airports etc - how exactly did they get away with it?

How did anyone believe that adding profits on the top will somehow result in better service/ ROI?

I returned yesterday from a short trip to visit family. At the airport, you are asked to throw water away for security check. But, you are forced to buy it at £3.50 for a small bottle. How is this fair?
Restaurants serve ridiculously expensive food, but no obligation to serve water. wtf ??

The other day, I saw an advertisement from SouthEastern. Why exactly do they need to advertise!??? SE trains are the only option I have !!

It's called Neolibralism and there's a great book about it by George Monbiot called The Invisible Doctrine.

I just want to point out that Transport for Wales is run by the Welsh Government. It is dire!
Cardiff airport was bought by the Welsh Government years ago for a shocking amount and every year since, they give it millions of pounds as it runs at a massive loss. It is obscene the amount of money they have thrown at it.
Also our water is supplied by Dwr Cymru, a non shareholding company whose mantra is ‘Not for profit’ and yet we have one of the highest water bills in the UK.

Nonsense. In much of Europe most of the vital services such as utilities and transport are run by the public sector. They are run for the benefit of the stakeholders - i.e. the users and general public - rather than for the benefit of shareholders.

@SharpLily "Those hanging all of this on Thatcher might want to be aware that privatisation of public services is not a British/Thatcher thing. The same thing was happening on an international level at that time, not something Thatcher came up with to punish the little people even more. As the world was discovering after the disastrous previous decades, for some reason public owned services don't seem to work very well."

Except you provide no evidence for this. Throughout Europe, publicly-owned services run very well, and can be managed in order to support wider initiatives. For example, where I live (in Europe) transport is integrated - trains and buses dovetail and there is a common ticketing and pricing structure because they are both publicly run. Public transport is promoted using "Car-Free days" when all public transport is free for a day. The existance of a reliable, hourly bus service means that the rural village where I live remains viable as somewhere to live for families and older people - which in turn takes pressure off the housing stock and services in the nearest large town, means that businesses can remain based in the village (and actually attract staff and customers from the town) and keeps the place vibrant. A private company looks solely at profits while a publicly-owned entity can be part of a wider integrated plan.

Plus they have almost finished privatising schools through the academies programme. Have standards gone up? Exam boards are also privatised hence exams cost 50-100 pounds to enter and yet they pay examiners about £5 to mark them - hence experienced teachers can't be bothered. Wake up and end this. In answer to your question OP. Thatcher is why we're in this mess. Plus a weak sniffling pathetic Labour Party that failed to argue against this and instead embraced privatisation.

I certainly never said that and "punishing the little people more"??!. The fact is that in the UK it was the Tory government that decided to sell off public services. People who can afford to pay more tax should do imho. But what happens is that the argument then gets hijacked by people who object to supporting "benefits scroungers" and "illegal immigrants" and some people with plenty of money don't see the benefit to society of contributing more.

All that selling off public services did was push the problems around the way they were managed and operated onto someone else.

I have mainly worked in the private sector in industries where redundancies are fairly common but have also had a role in the public sector. Some of the public sector departments I had to work with were shockingly lazy. One person refused to help a colleague when asked for help with a run of the mill problem stating that ‘it wasn’t in their job description’. I was so shocked. I’d never heard such a refusal to help another colleague before. There didn’t seem to be any motivation to work towards a shared goal whatsoever. Someone explained that that department was heavily unionised so nothing could be done.

Regular redundancies in my (private sector) employment would have had these lazy incompetents weeded out rapidly. Redundancies aren’t nice, but their threat certainly help instil a work ethic and they should be used more often in bloated government departments.

An older relative worked in power stations in the 1970s and said Thatcher was a necessary evil - most of the time they were unable to work because the miners were on strike again and there was no coal. The unions had brought the country to its knees and it urgently needed sorting out.

I’m too young to remember a Thatcher government but it would appear that was how, voters felt drastic change was needed and that’s what she offered.

Social housing was for anyone who needed a home, not for the disadvantaged. So council estates were a mixture of tenants -I knew an accountant who stayed in the Council house he'd moved into with his wife when they were first married. Conservative ideology was to allow people to own their own homes, so there were a lot of people sitting in council houses who were perfectly able to get a mortgage and buy their house, especially at the large discounts offered.

So there wasn't less demand, just a wider base but also a lot more council houses.

The Council home sell off would have been fine if there had been a requirement to replace each house sold. Of course that wasn't financially viable since the houses were sold off at a huge discount. So we are where we are - not enough Council houses, too many people on the waiting list.

One person refused to help a colleague when asked for help with a run of the mill problem stating that ‘it wasn’t in their job description’. That happens in the private sector too. My son repeated a staff member refusing to do a job she was asked to because "she didn't like it". That was private sector too.

Redundancies aren’t nice, but their threat certainly help instil a work ethic and they should be used more often in bloated government departments. How often would you like them? They're happening quite regularly in the public sector now. Each one causes enormous upheaval.

There's also the detail that you can't use redundancies to cherry pick who you get rid of. It's the job that's redundant, not the person. You can't get rid of one person, and then appoint someone else to do their job (better). Or you can, but you risk an Employment Tribunal. The way to get rid of underperformers is through the disciplinary process.

In theory you’re correct, in reality you can make anyone redundant as long as you can justify it if questioned.

Throughout Europe, publicly-owned services run very well And in England. It's just that the publicly owned services in question aren't owned by our government,

I can only talk about train and bus services, but they were public and absolutely crap in the 1980s. I was in my teens and travelling regularly to see my boyfriend, and they were always cancelled / late / didn’t turn up. So tbh they were easy pickings as it was hard to see how privatisation could make them worse!

All of the actual evidence that you have quoted or simply made up?

One of the original proposals was to have railway companies bid to run each and every service, per day. So, if you caught the same train for a week, you could end up travelling with up to 7 different companies. Farcical and completely unworkable.

I don't believe it was any worse than today. The current operating standards require that 95% of trains should be less than 5 mins late. That means, on average, as a regular commuter doing two journeys a day, you would expect an average of one train a fortnight to be running more than 5 mins late. I commuted for nearly 20 years on British Rail. There were not that many delays!

The main problem was lack of information. You were left saying "shall I wait for the train to A? Or shall I go to B and take a local service to A, which will obviously take longer? Or shall I go and have a meal and see if it's sorted itself out when I come back". Everything has better information now. British Rail with better information would be as good as what we have now, with two added advantages - connections would be held back if a train was running late so people wouldn't be stranded, and if the last train was cancelled, they'd get a taxi for you.

I was involved with Sealink so I know quite a lot about its sale. Like a number of privatisations around that time, it included many sweeteners that were non-core that could be disposed of by the purchaser to pay for the purchase of the company itself without impacting its operation. In the case of Sealink, the sale included Eversholt House, 2 British Rail golfing hotels and courses, 9 ports and their buildings, some ports included large quantities of land, 28 ships, a call centre in Ashford. The sale went through to James Sherwood of Sea Containers who very effectively asset stripped Sealink of its non-core assets clearing the entire borrowing that paid for Sealink's purchase within 18 months. The Tories attempted to fill the British Aerospace sale with similar non-core sweeteners but by that time the press had wised up to what was going on.

@MereDintofPandiculation "Social housing was for anyone who needed a home, not for the disadvantaged. So council estates were a mixture of tenants -I knew an accountant who stayed in the Council house he'd moved into with his wife when they were first married."

As it still is in many European countries where renting is far more the norm than in the UK.

In the UK, when I was growing up on a Council estate a few decades ago I was at school with the daughter of a Cambridge professor - the family lived in a council house - and a neighbour at the end of the street was likewise a university professor. The headmaster of my school lived almost opposite us, and several teachers were on the estate. The father of another school friend was the factory manager for an international company and many of my father's friends (and the fathers of my school friends) had skilled white-collar jobs - engineers, draughtsmen, managers - while just as many were manual workers.

And now we have "The train to London is run by company A who I believe to be overpriced and with poor customer service. I prefer to travel with company B.
Oh I can! ... but I'll have to go to Birmingham instead."

Same with water companies. The only way you can change water company is to move house.

So where were the advantages of competition supposed to come from?

British Rail was nationalised in the 1940s, when the network was on its knees after WW2. British Rail was crap because it was underfunded, not because it was state-owned. It still managed to upgrade its massive fleet of coaching stock to electric heating, electrify several key lines, invent and build the fabulously successful InterCity 125, plus innovate with things like the tilting train and merry-go-round coal trains.

TBF restaurants and shops at airports have always been privately run, and they profiteer because it is a captive market,

Yes, this was a good thing. DH grew up on a mixed council estate - and his parents neighbours included lawyers, uni lecturers, business owners, teachers etc as well as posties, mechanics, shop workers and secretaries. It was a great place to grow up.

I’m in Scotland and know someone who worked in senior management for ScotRail who left when it was privatised because they thought privatisation would be a disaster.

They also said all the old time union members liked to look back at the old days through rose tinted glasses but said it didn’t work very well back then.

I’ll emphasise - their opinion not mine.

But does it work very well now? The network gobbles up more public subsidy now than it ever did under state ownership.

They told people it would work better, be cheaper and that ordinary people could get rich on the shares

Too good to be true , a fairy story with a happy ending for everyone so of course loads of people believed it

Ordinary people aren't noticeable better off as a result but people will belief the next fairy story all the same

Somebody has to be making money out of everything.