There have been recent threads on the disaster of water privatisation - private profit, public debt, leaks and waste, and shit in the rivers.
But my top privatisation crime is the bus system. Apologies for the Guardian link (and it is a couple of years old) but this piece neatly summarises the mess that has been created:
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...private-market
https://chrgj.org/2021/07/19/press-r...nited-kingdom/
Almost four decades ago, Margaret Thatcher’s government boldly predicted that privatising Britain’s bus sector would lead to “lower fares, new services, and more passengers”, while removing “any potential future liability on the taxpayer”.
Today, those claims seem farcical, with much of the bus sector in crisis. Private operators have profited handsomely, but passengers dependent on buses to get to work, access services and visit loved ones have suffered greatly. Taxpayers are subsidising corporate profits, while companies run a service so confusing and ineffective that riders have abandoned it in droves, undermining efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.
London’s relatively well-run and highly regulated system is, in fact, an outlier in Britain. In the rest of England, Scotland and Wales, Thatcher’s extreme form of privatisation and deregulation largely prohibited municipal services and left it to private operators to decide which routes to run and how much to charge.
This arrangement, which is almost unique among wealthy nations, has delivered an expensive, unreliable and dysfunctional service. In England alone, more than 3,000 local-authority-supported routes have been cut or reduced in the past two decades, fares are up 403% since 1987 and ridership plummeted by 38% outside London between 1982 and 2016-17. Bus services are fragmented, with multiple operators running uncoordinated routes, each with their own tickets, schedules and maps. And passengers complain of unreliable service and poor coverage.
The privatised system has also proven remarkably expensive. Unlike public operators, which reinvest profits in service and cross-subsidise unprofitable routes, private companies extract profits as shareholder dividends. Meanwhile, the public is still on the hook. Taxpayer money accounts for 42% of funding for bus services in England outside London....
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Originally Posted by Wash DC Blue
