As the FT has noted:
Boris Johnson has threatened to privatise public bodies including the Passport Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency unless they sort out their major backlogs, he told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
The British prime minister said some public bodies had fallen victim to a “post-Covid mañana culture” with slower services than the public had a right to expect, officials said.
This is a classic right wing case study. These agencies, like others, have had the resources available to them cut to the absolute minimum. Then an unexpected surge in activity arises, in this case because of Covid, and it is said that they must be privatised.
By the time that they might be the surge condition will, of course, have long gone. But the excuse would remain.
Today it is the Passport Office and DVLA being lined up for privatisation. Will it be the NHS next?
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I wonder when they will privatise the Land Registry – that’s ripe to go.
When I finished paying for my house, Nationwide didn’t even furnish me with a copy of my deeds. They just told me the reference number and then I had to pay for them. They just could not be arsed to give me a copy having never missed a payment or caused them any problems. They’re no better than banks.
The VAT was nearly £6 for the deeds – well done the ‘low tax’ Tory party!! Ha!
Never mind Johnson: it’s got to be ABC all the way from now on folks.
I was so looking forward to getting the deeds to my house and maybe discovering some of its history. Apparently building societies no longer keep them and the Land Registry just scans basic info. I wanted the original old faded paperwork!
Land Registry is lucrative for government coffers so it’s unlikely to go
Oh, no doubt a privatised monopoly supplier such as the DVLA or Passport Office would provide a service that is no better but costs twice as much. What could possibly go wrong with privatising the registers of vehicles and driving license holders, or the issue of passports. No security implications there. Or perhaps we should set up a competitive environment with two or four or six passport issuers. Why not?
And we could abandon health and safety regulations, like we did building regulations. I doubt government ministers know anyone who has suffered a workplace injury.
And what is the point of the MOT. Why not let people drive unsafe vehicles if they want to. What could possibly go wrong?
The government is being run by a bunch of idiots.
Your penultimate point may be what this is really all about
Pure Ayn Rand
I cannot think of one privatised organisation that provides a better or more efficient service than its previously publicly owned self.
All of them are completely unaccountable and treat their customers with utter contempt.
From repeat criminals like the polluting water companies to those like Rail companies so publicly incompetent that they have to be repeatedly, secretly re-nationalised to save them, none of it works.
And, remarkably most of the public know this and would like to see them permanently renationalised, but our democracy has been so badly undermined by years of Thatcherism that at elections those that own the media are able to supress any discussion of the subject.
Join weownit.org.uk and fight to keep services in public ownership, or return services to public ownership. They have done some good work with Andy Burnham on the buses and rail.
I had to renew my driving licence at the beginning of the month. Couldn’t do it online as they needed a new photo. It took less than a week for it to be returned.
https://weownit.org.uk/why-public-ownership
You make some very good points Paul.
It’s always mystified me as to why the public sector could not be made to run more efficiently (some countries have very efficient public sectors, don’t they?), if indeed this ever was the problem, rather than privatising everything because of ideology.
I worry that great blogs like this one are just preaching to the converted.
It’s so easy for the media to keep banging on about lazy civil servants, lazy council workers etc. People rarely question this narrative. How do we get data about how ‘austerity’ has affected public services, and the cost/inefficiency etc of privatised services, into the public eye, in a way that the average person can understand?
This is probably the job of the Opposition, but they don’t seem to be very good at it.
As far as I can see, the Tory Party just wants to keep selling off the family silver, until there is nothing left. But as a country, isn’t it a good thing to own some assets (like the BBC, Channel 4 etc)? Once it’s all gone, what do we do then? As far as I can see, the only way is down.
‘Privatisation’ means a private company would be issuing passports or drivers licences in its own right (as occurred with privatisation of say, British Airways – we do literally receive services from a private company).
‘Outsourcing’ says that the public body (eg Passport Office or DVLA) remains the issuing body (and responsible for the issue) but pays a third party to carry out some of its tasks on its behalf.
Are you saying a private company might issue passports or drivers licences in its own right? Or when you say ‘privatisation’ do you mean ‘outsourcing’?
Johnson said privatisation
Then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There might be some outsourcing, but not privatisation. Not happening.
He could do it
That was the claim
It’s a nonsense claim. A passport issued by Serco or Capita or one of them in its own right wouldn’t have any validity across the world. Only nation states can issue them. They may pay someone to carry out some of the tasks but that’s not privatisation, that’s just a form of outsourcing.
I think you are wasting our time
Most of the passport office work is already outsourced – application processing, document processing, printing, delivery. As far as I know the only part not outsourced is decision making.
The energy crisis (or more correctly the fossil fuel company super profits bonanza) certainly shows what disaster privatisation of essential utilities has done. Macron, despite other inadequacies has held energy prices down to 4% in France rather than the UK’s suicidal increase of 50% now and 100%+ in October.
Could it be that Macron kept the energy price increases in France to 4% knowing that he was having to face a re-election challenge – or am I being too cynical?
It doesn’t matter, does it? It shows it can be done.
Detailed research that we have carried out over the past fifteen years has shown that company operations that are primarily “service” (typically call centres, catering, cleaning, customer finance, most maintenance, HR, payroll) are best kept in-house.
It is just ideology at play, like outsourcing refugees to Rwanda.
I wonder the Tories do not dollow the logic of privatisation to its logical conclusion: why not privatise the armed forces? Instead of the Royal Navy, The Maritime Security Ltd – as in the old days of privateering. And the Army – Landforce Co Ltd. Officers going back to purchasing commissions, and wealthy men raising regiments at their own expense. The RAF – Albion Flightpower Co. Ltd. – motto – Ex Aero ad Pecuniam.
Don’t joke about it. There were proposals during the Thatcher privatisation mania to sell off the armed forces. Even now, many of the back-office functions within the forces such as provision of housing and army vehicles servicing have been privatised.
Even now, people have not got it into their heads that all privatisation does is create an extra mouth to feed – the investor.
And that the investor – due to the perverted law of the land – comes first if anything goes wrong – before the staff and before the customer.
And that the investor will also constantly seek an uplift in their returns or threaten to walk off somewhere else. This results in ‘savings’ that reduce staffing levels, pay and pensions and transfers wealth from the many to the few and from young to old through pension actuaries.
And so wider benefits of the service to society are narrowed down.
My public sector organisation takes its savings and reserves and reinvests them back into the service through training, updating systems and incentive packages for staff and funding the building of affordable housing.
None of this would be possible I feel if we were privatised too. All that cash would go into private pockets, leaving the public commons much worse off.
This is the dirty, filthy truth about Thatcherism and always has been.