Privatization's Failures Are Stacking Up for the UK
A wholesale return to public ownership is no answer, after fiascoes from water to electricity to railways.
Are privatization’s failures washing away Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, like sand on this Indian beach?
Photographer: STRDEL/AFPOne way of evaluating privatized companies is to measure them against their own yardstick of progress. “It’s easy to forget how bad things were,” Water UK, the industry’s trade association, said in a 2019 assessment marking 30 years since suppliers in England and Wales were sold to investors. Under public ownership, “water quality was poor, rivers were polluted, and our beaches were badly affected by sewage.” Three decades later, the industry had been transformed and customers had “high levels of trust in water companies.” The appraisal hasn’t aged well.
If people need help remembering how bad things were, they can just look at how things are. Raw sewage discharges into England’s rivers and seas increased by more than half to a record last year, and public trust in the industry has cratered. Thames Water Utilities Ltd., the biggest supplier with 16 million customers in London and the southeast, is at risk of being taken back under state control — at least temporarily — after its owners defaulted on debt and declared the company “uninvestible.”