Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more14 Feb 2023

The UK privatisation experiment - a success or not?

What was privatisation really all about? Its advocates thought private sector meant efficiency, versus the failing, inefficient, public sector entities. But now looking at our neighbours in Europe - for example, in water - the evidence does not suggest that we have achieved the promised nirvana. UK utilities are not the envy of the world. Two more profound features of the past 30 years of privatisation have since emerged. First, the move from pay-as-you-go to pay-when-delivered. Under pay-as-you-go, current customers paid for the investment and the next generation benefited from the new infrastructure. They in turn would pay for the investment for the next generation, and so on. Under pay-when-delivered, future customers would pay for the new investments, and the balance sheets would be the way of raising the finance. But that is not what happened: the balance sheets have instead been used for financial engineering, mortgaging the assets and paying out dividends to shareholders. There is now no more money in the balance sheets to pay for new assets. We are being forced back to pay-as-you-go but with the added millstone of all the debt on the balance sheets as well. The second, related feature, is that the investment has had to come not from the UK savers, but from foreign investors who now own most of our core utilities and infrastructure networks. We sell them the ‘family silver’ to live beyond our means. But will we be able to afford to pay them back on their investment? Given the current cost of living crisis and state of the UK economy, the returns on investment are looking less secure.

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