The UK government privatised water companies in England. In Scotland the water remained nationalised.
In recent years, the UK government started measuring water quality, by installing measurement devices absolutely everywhere in England. The measurement devices then show that the rivers have lots of shit in them. But the point is, the shit is not a new development - they always had shit.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the rivers are not monitored, there's a pathetically small quantity of measurement devices installed. Hence there's no scandal in Scotland because ignorance is bliss I suppose, not because nationalised water is somehow amazingly better.
Somehow people with a narrative to push turn this into a tale of how privatisation is terrible despite there being no evidence to back this up whatsoever.
The amount of monitoring, or even the amount of shit in the water aren't a good measure of how well privatization has served the public interest, at least not without context.
Monitoring is a good thing to have, and clean water is a good thing to have. Those are valid metrics, but what also must be considered are the costs of providing those services, how available/accessible the services are to the public, the price the public pays for them, etc.
I'd love to see an in depth analysis the impacts of privatization in the UK, but I'd be surprised if the public was better off because of it.
In the end, privatization tends to be the worst option because of one simple fact: in addition to total compensation of all the costs required to provide the service to the public, the private entity also demands that they make a profit on top of that.
A government can provide a service without any pressure to charge anything more than needed to keep the system going. Governments can even run essential services at a loss if needed. The government, unconcerned with personal enrichment, only has to worry about providing the best service to everyone.
The private corporation only cares about profits and the endless growth of those profits so they will do anything to enrich themselves even at the expense of the public.
Government is incentivized to provide what the public wants because when it fails they risk being voted out of office. Corporations are incentivized to provide as little as possible, spending as little as possible to provide it, while charging the public as much as possible and they are not accountable to the public at all.
> privatization tends to be the worst option because of one simple fact: in addition to total compensation of all the costs required to provide the service to the public, the private entity also demands that they make a profit on top of that
This applies to all private efforts. Yet history shows the private sector can compete with public initiatives. The difference is competition. Water utilities don't have competition. They're born into a mode of market failure. For natural monopolies, public management seems to work best.
You're right. Competition changes the math substantially. It means the pubic can get tailored services that suit their unique needs and a large number of companies trying to one-up each other fuels innovation.
The public is unlikely to be better off when the service being provided doesn't really allow for competition and utilities and infrastructure are great examples of that. For products and services where competition is desirable, easy, and plentiful I want those options and the government's role should be limited to regulating where necessary to ensure that competition stays strong and the public is protected.
> For natural monopolies, public management seems to work best.
What makes you think so? If the government can't incentivize a private company with a natural monopoly so that it provides an effective service, why would it inherently be easier for it to incentivize public employees to provide an effective service?
It's not like it's immediately obvious from superficial inspection either, it seems to me like there are relative success cases and failure cases of both publicly and privately run natural monopolies. For example, taking rail transport: the UK has privatized it trains and the result is lack-luster, France has a state run railway company which seems to do a pretty good job, and Japan has at least notionally privatized it's railways and provides famously world-class rail service).
The UK government privatised water companies in England. In Scotland the water remained nationalised.
In recent years, the UK government started measuring water quality, by installing measurement devices absolutely everywhere in England. The measurement devices then show that the rivers have lots of shit in them. But the point is, the shit is not a new development - they always had shit.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the rivers are not monitored, there's a pathetically small quantity of measurement devices installed. Hence there's no scandal in Scotland because ignorance is bliss I suppose, not because nationalised water is somehow amazingly better.
Somehow people with a narrative to push turn this into a tale of how privatisation is terrible despite there being no evidence to back this up whatsoever.