How privatisation has failed to deliver for the country - Yorkshire Post Letters

Let’s face it: Privatisation has failed. It was meant to be the answer to streamlining public services, but our daily reality is clearly very, very different. Over the past few decades, selling our water, energy, and transport into private hands has not only not delivered improved quality or lowered costs, but instead has actually made things much worse.

Take, for example, the water companies crisis that has left beaches and all our rivers polluted by untreated sewage. The law allows leeway for this. The private companies, whose purpose and motivation is financial profit rather than providing good public services, regularly discharge millions of tons of untreated waste into our natural environment. It’s cheaper for them to simply pay the fines and dump it, rather than treat it.

Our laws are not robust enough to stop them. It’s a hidden moral and legislative disaster as well as the more visible environmental one.

The UK public are now exposed to health risks and are witnessing massive long-term environmental degradation as well as facing higher bills, all because private pay and profits for (often overseas) shareholders are the priority. Money is borrowed to pay eye-watering executive salaries, while we are told that companies are in debt and the public must help out if we want investment in new infrastructure.

Facilitating processes which undermine the principles of fairness and democracy is not just an economic issue but is an ethical and political one. Privatisation has created a system where the rich get richer and the rest are left to foot the bill. It has increased inequality and betrayed the public’s trust in institutions.

Isn’t it time for a serious reckoning of what our nation’s priorities should be? Those across the political spectrum who so endanger our planet in the pursuit of personal wealth like this are acting like dangerous criminals. Shouldn’t the law treat them as such?