DATE OF ISSUE: FRIDAY 5th SEPTEMBER 2008
Calls for a 'windfall tax' are sure to increase following the news that the 'Big Six' energy companies hiked their shareholder dividends payouts by 19% according to new research. The suppliers paid £1.64bn in dividends in 2007, £257m more than in the year before, a study commissioned by the Local Government Association found.
While calls for a windfall tax are understandable, the Campaign for Public Ownership believes that the only long-term solution to the problem of energy company profiteering is to restore the energy companies to public ownership.
The problem lies in the ownership structure of the energy companies. All of them are Public Limited Companies, whose overriding aim is to maximise profits for shareholders. That's what PLCs do. Instead of reacting with horror to the entirely predictable news that PLCs are putting the interests of shareholders before Britain's long-suffering energy consumers, we should instead be calling for the government to take the one step that will lead to lower energy prices in the long term. Restoring the energy companies to public ownership will mean that prices can be lowered, as there will be no shareholder dividends to pay.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
Press Release From the Campaign for Public Ownership on the Latest Loss of Confidential Government Data by a Private Contractor
ISSUED: FRIDAY 22nd AUGUST 2008
Data including the names, addresses and dates of birth of around 33,000 offenders in England and Wales with six or more recordable convictions in the past 12 months on the Police National Computer have been lost by the private company PA Consulting, contractors for the Home Office. Also lost were the names and dates of birth of 10,000 prolific and other priority offenders, and the names, dates of birth and, in some cases, the expected prison release dates of all 84,000 prisoners held in England and Wales.
Sounds familiar?
Back in December it was announced that US firm Pearson Driving Assessments, a contractor to the Driving Standards Agency, had lost the details of three million candidates for the driving theory test. Pearson reported that a hard drive was missing from a “secure facility” in Iowa.
And of course earlier this summer we had the news that thousands of British schoolchildren would have to wait until the autumn for key test results after the US-owned company brought in to administer the tests 'ETS Europe' failed to deliver on time.
Shadow Chancellor Dominic Grieve says, a propos of the latest loss of data by a private company: "What is more scandalous is that it is not the first time that the government has been shown to be completely incapable of protecting the integrity of highly sensitive data, rendering them unfit to be charged with protecting our safety."
Of course, Grieve doesn't mention that it's a private company, not the government, which has lost the data. He doesn't because he and his party are fanatical supporters of privatisation- and the process of sub-contracting government tasks to private, often foreign owned companies. In fact, it was the Conservatives who started this process when they were last in power. The biggest charge that can be made against the present Labour government is that they have continued with such a disastrous policy. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the days of privatisation and sub-contracting government work to private companies, such loss of data never occurred.
Once again, the British people are losing out due to adherence to neo-liberal dogma.
It’s time for the government to end the sub-contracting of government work to private companies and to keep all such work ‘in-house’. Not only would this reduce the chance of confidential data going missing, it would also save the taxpayer a small fortune in paying for inefficient private companies.
Data including the names, addresses and dates of birth of around 33,000 offenders in England and Wales with six or more recordable convictions in the past 12 months on the Police National Computer have been lost by the private company PA Consulting, contractors for the Home Office. Also lost were the names and dates of birth of 10,000 prolific and other priority offenders, and the names, dates of birth and, in some cases, the expected prison release dates of all 84,000 prisoners held in England and Wales.
Sounds familiar?
Back in December it was announced that US firm Pearson Driving Assessments, a contractor to the Driving Standards Agency, had lost the details of three million candidates for the driving theory test. Pearson reported that a hard drive was missing from a “secure facility” in Iowa.
And of course earlier this summer we had the news that thousands of British schoolchildren would have to wait until the autumn for key test results after the US-owned company brought in to administer the tests 'ETS Europe' failed to deliver on time.
Shadow Chancellor Dominic Grieve says, a propos of the latest loss of data by a private company: "What is more scandalous is that it is not the first time that the government has been shown to be completely incapable of protecting the integrity of highly sensitive data, rendering them unfit to be charged with protecting our safety."
Of course, Grieve doesn't mention that it's a private company, not the government, which has lost the data. He doesn't because he and his party are fanatical supporters of privatisation- and the process of sub-contracting government tasks to private, often foreign owned companies. In fact, it was the Conservatives who started this process when they were last in power. The biggest charge that can be made against the present Labour government is that they have continued with such a disastrous policy. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the days of privatisation and sub-contracting government work to private companies, such loss of data never occurred.
Once again, the British people are losing out due to adherence to neo-liberal dogma.
It’s time for the government to end the sub-contracting of government work to private companies and to keep all such work ‘in-house’. Not only would this reduce the chance of confidential data going missing, it would also save the taxpayer a small fortune in paying for inefficient private companies.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Press Release From The Campaign for Public Ownership on the Competition Commission's Report on the Future of BAA
ISSUED: WEDNESDAY 20th AUGUST 2008
Across the political spectrum there is widespread agreement that BAA-owned airports, with their long queues, lack of seats and tacky, shopping mall atmosphere, are a national disgrace.
But the solution is not to break up BAA's monopoly and introduce 'more competition' as The Competition Commission recommends. The answer is to take BAA back into public ownership, and for the company to be run as a not-for-profit enterprise.
Britain is the only country in Europe that has been foolish enough to privatise its major international airports. It is no coincidence that Manchester Airport, which has not been privatised, regularly comes out highest in surveys of customer satisfaction was voted Britain’s Best Regional Airport in 2007.
Sir Terence Conran, who designed Terminal One at Heathrow and the North Terminal in the 1960s, has contrasted the brief he received from the owners of the airports back then - the British state - with the instructions Lord (Richard) Rogers, the architect of Terminal 5, got from BAA.
Conran was told to put in as many seats as possible, with the priority being to make passengers 'relax and feel at ease'. At Terminal One there were only three shops.
The privatised BAA told Rogers to put in as few seats as possible: there are only 700 seats for a terminal handling an average of 80,000 passengers. BAA wants people to pay to sit down at the terminal's expensive cafes and restaurants - not sit down for free, eating their own sandwiches.
The approach perfectly illustrates the difference in ethos between a publicly-owned company, for whom profit is not the be all and end all, and a privatised one.
We can't blame BAA for treating every square foot at Heathrow as a profit centre: it's a private company which wants to maximise returns for its shareholders. But we can blame the politicians foolish enough to sell off BAA in the first place. Allowing other profit-hungry plcs to compete to run our airports would only mean more of the same. Even the Competition Commission acknowledge that the basic problem lies in BAA's 'ownership structure'.
It’s time to restore BAA to public ownership.
Across the political spectrum there is widespread agreement that BAA-owned airports, with their long queues, lack of seats and tacky, shopping mall atmosphere, are a national disgrace.
But the solution is not to break up BAA's monopoly and introduce 'more competition' as The Competition Commission recommends. The answer is to take BAA back into public ownership, and for the company to be run as a not-for-profit enterprise.
Britain is the only country in Europe that has been foolish enough to privatise its major international airports. It is no coincidence that Manchester Airport, which has not been privatised, regularly comes out highest in surveys of customer satisfaction was voted Britain’s Best Regional Airport in 2007.
Sir Terence Conran, who designed Terminal One at Heathrow and the North Terminal in the 1960s, has contrasted the brief he received from the owners of the airports back then - the British state - with the instructions Lord (Richard) Rogers, the architect of Terminal 5, got from BAA.
Conran was told to put in as many seats as possible, with the priority being to make passengers 'relax and feel at ease'. At Terminal One there were only three shops.
The privatised BAA told Rogers to put in as few seats as possible: there are only 700 seats for a terminal handling an average of 80,000 passengers. BAA wants people to pay to sit down at the terminal's expensive cafes and restaurants - not sit down for free, eating their own sandwiches.
The approach perfectly illustrates the difference in ethos between a publicly-owned company, for whom profit is not the be all and end all, and a privatised one.
We can't blame BAA for treating every square foot at Heathrow as a profit centre: it's a private company which wants to maximise returns for its shareholders. But we can blame the politicians foolish enough to sell off BAA in the first place. Allowing other profit-hungry plcs to compete to run our airports would only mean more of the same. Even the Competition Commission acknowledge that the basic problem lies in BAA's 'ownership structure'.
It’s time to restore BAA to public ownership.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Campaign for Public Ownership Press Release on British Gas Profiteering
The Campaign for Public Ownership condemns the decision of British Gas to hike gas prices by a record 35%.
The price increases come just six months after the company increased its dual fuel bills by 16 per cent.
While Centrica customers have been hit by a 44 per cent increase in their bills this year, the company's shareholders have suffered far less, with its shares dipping by less than 10 per cent since the start of the year.
And today, to rub salt into the wound, Centrica plc, the parent company of British Gas, will announce profits of £992m.
British Gas is profiteering, pure and simple. The appropriate response from the government is not greater regulation as some have called for, or a one-off windfall tax, but to end the profiteering once and for all by taking our utilities back into public ownership.
The price increases come just six months after the company increased its dual fuel bills by 16 per cent.
While Centrica customers have been hit by a 44 per cent increase in their bills this year, the company's shareholders have suffered far less, with its shares dipping by less than 10 per cent since the start of the year.
And today, to rub salt into the wound, Centrica plc, the parent company of British Gas, will announce profits of £992m.
British Gas is profiteering, pure and simple. The appropriate response from the government is not greater regulation as some have called for, or a one-off windfall tax, but to end the profiteering once and for all by taking our utilities back into public ownership.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Dr Branson will see you now
From The Sunday Express, 20th July 2008
VIRGIN tycoon Sir Richard Branson is being courted by health chiefs planning to privatise hospital casualty units.
Tens of thousands of patients walking into Accident and Emergency departments could be treated by the private sector in sweeping reforms of the NHS.
Billionaire Branson and his 26-year-old daughter Holly, pictured, who recently qualified as a doctor, plan to bid to run the new generation of GP super-surgeries called polyclinics.
Health chiefs in north London have confirmed that a meeting was held with senior officials from Bransonís fledgling firm Virgin Healthcare.
Discussions took place about closing four GP surgeries in Camden and merging them to form a polyclinic at University College Hospital, pictured right.
The clinic, in a disused casualty wing, would treat all emergency cases except those brought in by ambulance or referred by GPs ñ about 70,000 patients a year.
VIRGIN tycoon Sir Richard Branson is being courted by health chiefs planning to privatise hospital casualty units.
Tens of thousands of patients walking into Accident and Emergency departments could be treated by the private sector in sweeping reforms of the NHS.
Billionaire Branson and his 26-year-old daughter Holly, pictured, who recently qualified as a doctor, plan to bid to run the new generation of GP super-surgeries called polyclinics.
Health chiefs in north London have confirmed that a meeting was held with senior officials from Bransonís fledgling firm Virgin Healthcare.
Discussions took place about closing four GP surgeries in Camden and merging them to form a polyclinic at University College Hospital, pictured right.
The clinic, in a disused casualty wing, would treat all emergency cases except those brought in by ambulance or referred by GPs ñ about 70,000 patients a year.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The fatal cost of bus privatisation
From the Daily Mail, Tuesday 8th July
Bus company bosses jailed after exhausted Polish driver who couldn't speak English killed workman on a crane
Two bus company chiefs who hired Polish drivers who didn't speak English or know how to handle a double- decker have been jailed after a workman was knocked down and killed.
Vincenzo Casale, 44, and David Ellis, 37, were 'morally responsible' for the death of Martin Pilling, a court was told.
The 27-year-old workman was at the top of a 'cherry picker' crane when it was hit by a bus with Polish driver Krzysztof Ociepa at the wheel.
Mr Pilling was knocked out of the cherry picker's 'basket' and suffered fatal injuries.
An investigation into the bus firm in the wake of the tragedy found a catalogue of safety breaches by the cost-cutting bosses who had employed 100 Polish drivers.
Bus drivers at UK North and GM Buses Enterprises Ltd worked up to 31 consecutive days without a proper break and one Polish employee ripped the roof off a double-decker because he was lost and didn't understand warning road signs.
Bosses Casale and Ellis were sent to prison for 15 months last week after they admitted trying to cover up evidence of the safety breaches.
Last night Mr Pilling's father Tony, 53, who works as a systems manager for another bus firm, condemned the pair for cutting corners.
'It was pure greed and profit that drove these men,' he said.
Bus company bosses jailed after exhausted Polish driver who couldn't speak English killed workman on a crane
Two bus company chiefs who hired Polish drivers who didn't speak English or know how to handle a double- decker have been jailed after a workman was knocked down and killed.
Vincenzo Casale, 44, and David Ellis, 37, were 'morally responsible' for the death of Martin Pilling, a court was told.
The 27-year-old workman was at the top of a 'cherry picker' crane when it was hit by a bus with Polish driver Krzysztof Ociepa at the wheel.
Mr Pilling was knocked out of the cherry picker's 'basket' and suffered fatal injuries.
An investigation into the bus firm in the wake of the tragedy found a catalogue of safety breaches by the cost-cutting bosses who had employed 100 Polish drivers.
Bus drivers at UK North and GM Buses Enterprises Ltd worked up to 31 consecutive days without a proper break and one Polish employee ripped the roof off a double-decker because he was lost and didn't understand warning road signs.
Bosses Casale and Ellis were sent to prison for 15 months last week after they admitted trying to cover up evidence of the safety breaches.
Last night Mr Pilling's father Tony, 53, who works as a systems manager for another bus firm, condemned the pair for cutting corners.
'It was pure greed and profit that drove these men,' he said.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
New Zealand is in tune with the times- Britain's lagging
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian, Thursday 3rd July 2008
New Zealand has long had a record of being ahead of the political game. It was the first country in the world to accept women's right to vote, in 1893. In the 1930s, it emerged as a pioneer of the modern welfare state. Fifty years later, in the 1980s, it was the first state to declare itself nuclear-free. Less creditably, during the same decade, New Zealand became host to the first social democratic government to embrace a free-market programme of wholesale privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation.
Named after New Zealand Labour's then finance minister, "Rogernomics" was all the rage on the global new right for a time - and laid the ground for neoliberal social democratic governments like Tony Blair's - until it finally imploded amidst a litany of social and economic failures: stagnation, unemployment, bankruptcies, crime and rampant inequality. Two decades on, another New Zealand government, this time a more progressive Labour coalition headed by Helen Clark, is again at the forefront of political change - leading the revival of public ownership.
On Tuesday, Clark's government renationalised the country's railways and ferry services, privatised in the early 90s and subsequently run down and asset-stripped by the Australian owners. Launching the new, publicly owned KiwiRail, finance minister Michael Cullen declared that privatisation had "been a painful lesson for New Zealand". Nor is this the first renationalisation by the Clark government, which took over Air New Zealand after it nearly collapsed in 2001 and has also built up a successful state-owned retail bank - named Kiwibank, needless to say.
And unlike Gordon Brown's government, which strained every nerve to avoid nationalising Northern Rock to avoid seeming "old Labour", Clark has championed the takeover of rail as exactly what is needed to build a modern, environmentally sustainable transport network. Against a background of global warming and rising fuel prices, she argues, rail is a "central part of 21st-century economic infrastructure".
Given Britain's similarly disastrous experience with rail privatisation, you might think that taking a leaf out New Zealand's book would be just the kind of popular policy to help dig Brown's government out of its hole. Despite the modest improvements achieved by putting the lethal Railtrack out of its misery, Britain's railway system remains a byword for bewildering fragmentation, unreliability, overcrowding, delays and exorbitant cost - which has only now completed a high-speed link to the Channel tunnel, 15 years after its state-owned French counterpart.
Fleeced by the private train companies and rolling stock contractors (some of them pocketing 30% rates of return), it is now the most expensive, opaque and inefficient rail system in Europe. As the Campaign for Better Transport reported yesterday, walk-on fares are on average nearly five times those booked in advance - and all ticket prices are set to spiral in the next few years. Meanwhile, renationalisation is strongly supported by the public and is in fact official Labour party policy.
But far from planning to end what has been a disastrous experiment, the rail minister, Tom Harris, last month insisted that if the Tories hadn't privatised the railways, New Labour would have sold them off when it came to power in 1997. In a surreal aside that will baffle most UK train passengers, he insisted that "the private railway has provided a level of investment, innovation, imagination that wouldn't have happened if BR had stayed as it was".
This is nonsense. Investment in the railways comes from farepayers and government subsidy, now around three times the level before privatisation (£2bn a year goes to the train operating companies alone), while the leakage of cash from the industry to private investors and lenders is estimated at £800m a year. The rise in passenger numbers is simply the product of economic growth, and the case for a reintegrated, publicly owned rail system - at the heart of a national investment programme to encourage more people to move off road and air travel on to rail - is overwhelming. It has the added advantage that most services can be taken back at no cost as franchises expire.
But the government is still in the grip of an ideology that sees privatisation as the only way to reform the health service, and nationalisation as a throwback to be avoided at all costs. As global economic conditions increasingly undermine the credibility of free-market economics, however, real life is pointing in another direction. The revival of public ownership in countries as diverse as New Zealand and Venezuela reflects a wider disillusionment with the neoliberal experience of the past decade.
As the writer and Work Foundation chief executive Will Hutton recently argued in a BBC programme on nationalisation, the takeover of Northern Rock, Railtrack and Metronet has begun to force a mainstream reappraisal of what had become a political taboo - just as academic research has been rehabilitating the productivity and costs record of Britain's postwar nationalised industries.
But it's also clear that, if there is going to be an effective new role for public enterprise and intervention, it will have to be about more than bailing out the failures of the private sector in traditional industries, and engage with the cutting edge of the economy. In Britain, the credit crisis has exposed the dangers of the reliance on finance, the rundown of manufacturing, and the chronically low rate of investment in the economy. The case for a national fibre-optic network, for example, giving universal fast broadband access to the home is a powerful one, both on economic and social grounds - countries such as South Korea are far ahead of Britain. But the private sector won't deliver the necessary multibillion pound long-term investment. A publicly owned network, on the other hand, could do - perhaps funded by service providers as part of a universal service obligation, as the Communication Workers Union argues.
What is certain is that the Brown government's kneejerk resistance to public intervention and ownership will have to end if it is to have a hope of riding out the crisis and dealing with the new economic reality. By making a stand for progressive common sense, New Zealand has at least helped break the spell that privatisation is somehow the natural order of things in the modern world.
New Zealand has long had a record of being ahead of the political game. It was the first country in the world to accept women's right to vote, in 1893. In the 1930s, it emerged as a pioneer of the modern welfare state. Fifty years later, in the 1980s, it was the first state to declare itself nuclear-free. Less creditably, during the same decade, New Zealand became host to the first social democratic government to embrace a free-market programme of wholesale privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation.
Named after New Zealand Labour's then finance minister, "Rogernomics" was all the rage on the global new right for a time - and laid the ground for neoliberal social democratic governments like Tony Blair's - until it finally imploded amidst a litany of social and economic failures: stagnation, unemployment, bankruptcies, crime and rampant inequality. Two decades on, another New Zealand government, this time a more progressive Labour coalition headed by Helen Clark, is again at the forefront of political change - leading the revival of public ownership.
On Tuesday, Clark's government renationalised the country's railways and ferry services, privatised in the early 90s and subsequently run down and asset-stripped by the Australian owners. Launching the new, publicly owned KiwiRail, finance minister Michael Cullen declared that privatisation had "been a painful lesson for New Zealand". Nor is this the first renationalisation by the Clark government, which took over Air New Zealand after it nearly collapsed in 2001 and has also built up a successful state-owned retail bank - named Kiwibank, needless to say.
And unlike Gordon Brown's government, which strained every nerve to avoid nationalising Northern Rock to avoid seeming "old Labour", Clark has championed the takeover of rail as exactly what is needed to build a modern, environmentally sustainable transport network. Against a background of global warming and rising fuel prices, she argues, rail is a "central part of 21st-century economic infrastructure".
Given Britain's similarly disastrous experience with rail privatisation, you might think that taking a leaf out New Zealand's book would be just the kind of popular policy to help dig Brown's government out of its hole. Despite the modest improvements achieved by putting the lethal Railtrack out of its misery, Britain's railway system remains a byword for bewildering fragmentation, unreliability, overcrowding, delays and exorbitant cost - which has only now completed a high-speed link to the Channel tunnel, 15 years after its state-owned French counterpart.
Fleeced by the private train companies and rolling stock contractors (some of them pocketing 30% rates of return), it is now the most expensive, opaque and inefficient rail system in Europe. As the Campaign for Better Transport reported yesterday, walk-on fares are on average nearly five times those booked in advance - and all ticket prices are set to spiral in the next few years. Meanwhile, renationalisation is strongly supported by the public and is in fact official Labour party policy.
But far from planning to end what has been a disastrous experiment, the rail minister, Tom Harris, last month insisted that if the Tories hadn't privatised the railways, New Labour would have sold them off when it came to power in 1997. In a surreal aside that will baffle most UK train passengers, he insisted that "the private railway has provided a level of investment, innovation, imagination that wouldn't have happened if BR had stayed as it was".
This is nonsense. Investment in the railways comes from farepayers and government subsidy, now around three times the level before privatisation (£2bn a year goes to the train operating companies alone), while the leakage of cash from the industry to private investors and lenders is estimated at £800m a year. The rise in passenger numbers is simply the product of economic growth, and the case for a reintegrated, publicly owned rail system - at the heart of a national investment programme to encourage more people to move off road and air travel on to rail - is overwhelming. It has the added advantage that most services can be taken back at no cost as franchises expire.
But the government is still in the grip of an ideology that sees privatisation as the only way to reform the health service, and nationalisation as a throwback to be avoided at all costs. As global economic conditions increasingly undermine the credibility of free-market economics, however, real life is pointing in another direction. The revival of public ownership in countries as diverse as New Zealand and Venezuela reflects a wider disillusionment with the neoliberal experience of the past decade.
As the writer and Work Foundation chief executive Will Hutton recently argued in a BBC programme on nationalisation, the takeover of Northern Rock, Railtrack and Metronet has begun to force a mainstream reappraisal of what had become a political taboo - just as academic research has been rehabilitating the productivity and costs record of Britain's postwar nationalised industries.
But it's also clear that, if there is going to be an effective new role for public enterprise and intervention, it will have to be about more than bailing out the failures of the private sector in traditional industries, and engage with the cutting edge of the economy. In Britain, the credit crisis has exposed the dangers of the reliance on finance, the rundown of manufacturing, and the chronically low rate of investment in the economy. The case for a national fibre-optic network, for example, giving universal fast broadband access to the home is a powerful one, both on economic and social grounds - countries such as South Korea are far ahead of Britain. But the private sector won't deliver the necessary multibillion pound long-term investment. A publicly owned network, on the other hand, could do - perhaps funded by service providers as part of a universal service obligation, as the Communication Workers Union argues.
What is certain is that the Brown government's kneejerk resistance to public intervention and ownership will have to end if it is to have a hope of riding out the crisis and dealing with the new economic reality. By making a stand for progressive common sense, New Zealand has at least helped break the spell that privatisation is somehow the natural order of things in the modern world.
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