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The fundamental problem at present is that the government has been given to belief that if they took it into public ownership, they'd have to pay all its billions of debts. This, oddly, is not a problem that's dogged any of its previous owners, and a very simple solution would be to fine it, say, £40bn for being useless and then pick it up for free. So that's possible. However one of the compelling arguments that got it privatised in the first place was that government-run operations aren't often very well run. They might promise 40 new reservoirs to get them through an election, but that's the last you'll hear of it till the water-rates bill arrives, and there's precious little in the way of economic "growth" to be had out of processing sewage. There are advantages, perhaps, to having an accountable hand on the tiller, but governments, and their agencies, tend not to very accountable. Last December, for example, the Office for Environmental Protection released a report detailing how DEFRA, the Environment Agency and Ofwat had all failed in their legal duties, but as the OEP's powers extend only to writing reports, that's as far as it went. An alternative might be to have it run as an autonomous business, with the government holding the only share. But that's what they did with the Post Office where any benefits of privatisation have become only a boondoggle for lawyers. Not that lawyers don't deserve the compulsory generosity of taxpayers, but their needs must surely be secondary to the Post Office's vital core missions of re-selling stamps, not handing out pensions and cooking the digital books. Which leaves us, I think, in need of a Third Way. That might seem a little too Blairite for some, but I think there's a way to add a Corbynish gloss by setting it up as a co-operative, owned not by the state but by its customers, who would have an interest in striking a balance between increasing bills, maintaining supplies and preserving their own environment, and who'd be able to hold the management to account without having to go through a web of five regulators by way of the office of a part-time representative with an eye on a job in the Cabinet. There are risks with that, of course, in that the shoutiest can exert the most influence, and the shoutiest are not often the most wise, but with everyone having an equal stake, the shoutiest usually get shouted down, which is why co-operatives tend to last longer than businesses steered by cliques of shareholders or political advisers. In other words, the optimum and correct path to take is tried and tested and sitting right there and I'll eat my hat if it happens. -
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It would cost so much now. But pay off for us in the long run. Thatcher and her privatisation of public services. It is a total disaster
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