Every UK citizen has a right to a bank account here. Mr Farage praised the UK government today for its words and actions over cancellation of accounts. The Nat West CEO has apologised for her conduct and left the job. I have not been involved in this issue but post this so people can comment on the matter if they wish. As usual contributions making personal attacks and unsubstantiated allegations will not be posted.
There are pressures today to identify core public services and claim they need to be nationalised again. The list is often strange. Water is on but food is not. Rail travel is on but air or road travel is not. Electricity is on but broadband is not.
As I was pointing out yesterday there are very few monopoly provided services using state employees and equipment and offering a free service. We could not afford many of them given the large tax costs they entail. Prices that people have to pay provide a necessary curb on excessive demand in many cases and send signals about scarcities. Whilst the UK has made clear it has no wish to ration health care by price when people are in need of care and help, it is generally agreed that for most things in life charging makes sense. To make sure people can afford enough of the basics like water and energy all parties believe in income support, minimum pay and other means to ensure people can afford what they need. Offering free power or water to the family that can afford the heated swimming pool or the six bedroom mansion would not be a good idea.
So the case for nationalisation is the case to restore public monopolies that have powers to charge people for energy, water or whatever they produce. When we had public monopolies for water, energy, and some transport modes in the 1960s and 1970s there were constant problems. These bodies did not do a good job in keeping prices down. There was no competitive threat to keep them honest or to press them to greater productivity. Rail fares, water and power bills often went up too much and there was little anyone could do about it. There was no opportunity to switch provider.
Nationalisation was bad for innovation and investment. Our telecoms system fell way behind the USA in terms of technology and efficiency, sticking with electro mechanical systems when the US was going electronic. Our electricity industry stuck with inefficient and dirty coal stations. Our water industry carried on running a pipe system that was creaking from age and inadequacy. They rationed access to a phone making people wait for a line or sharing a line with the neighbours. Water was often rationed in a dry summer with hose pipe bans or worse. The nationalised industries were always at the back of the queue for extra money to invest behind key services like the NHS and education. All their capital had to be approved and formed part of the state budget.
Service levels were often disappointing. The water industry regularly fouled our beaches . Trains were often late or cancelled. The telephone system limited the devices you could add to the network and could not provide good quality data lines for business in some cases.
Were the UK to want to renationalise it would be a monumental waste of taxpayer money. The UK could not confiscate the privatised assets like some communist autocracy, needing to respect international laws of ownership and trade rules. The money spent on buying the existing assets would balloon state debt without adding a penny to the amount the industries could invest. No prudent Chancellor would want to find big sums for additional utility investment on top of the other many budget demands. There would be no guarantee that prices were lower or service better than the current privatised levels. Indeed, history suggest they would likely to worse, as the absence of competition blunts achievement.
We were prisoners of nationalised monopolies when we had them. Taxpayers had to bail them out and pay their losses. Customers were treated badly, faced rationing and poor service
The crude public sector good private sector bad which dominates much opposition party thinking is no reflection of the reality of life.
Some years ago I wrote about how we could better characterise and assess public services. I proposed assessing each with three main questions:
Are they competitive or monopolies?
Are they owned and run by the state or by private individuals and companies?
Do they charge customers for their service or are they offered free to users?
These questions reveal that there is more to life than an all public or an all private service.
The two types that get closest to what the public v private thinkers have in mind are
There are then the following
A private monopoly provided free to users – a free local newspaper, a local radio station
Private competitive services provided free to users Much social media, independent tv
Public monopolies charging customers – Planning services, much licensing activity like passports and driving licences
Public near monopolies using substantial private sector competitive contractors – the NHS buys in all its drugs and contracts out various hotel services to private sector staff
Competitive services delivered in part by public sector owned institutions – Council leisure services that charge, Public sector transport
“Free” competitive services provided by state organisations and financed from taxes BBC, state museums
You could add to this analysis the provision of services by the third or charitable sector, where their provision may be free to users or may be subsidised competition to the private sector as with charity shops and leisure offerings.
In the private sector attention is centred on what service or good the company provides. If I go to shop I do not want to be told how much the shop spends on buying and selling things and managing itself. I would not regard a shop that cost £1m to run each year as intrinsically better than one which cost £900,000. I go to the shops that offer the best prices and service quality, concentrating on what I as a customer receive and the value it represents. Shops can win more custom by cutting their costs of managing themselves to lower their prices. Discount food retailers have done well out of stripping down costs of display, property and support staff, When the private sector delivers poor service or bad goods it usually apologises, takes the blame and where necessary offers compensation.
Many people in the public services concentrate on the inputs rather than the outputs. Much of the debate is about how much extra money is put in, about many extra people are appointed to provide the service. To some political parties extra or additional or “new” money is all important and to them has magical powers which the base budget or the “old” money does not possess. This is strange misconception. The base budget is always the dominant part of the money, and more attention needs to be given to how that is spent each year with a constant thirst for improvement. When the public services deliver poor service they normally say they were “underfunded”. They say remedy for poor service is more cash and people. Rarely do they say they got it wrong, will do better and misspent or failed to direct the resources they had available.
Of course there are times when we do need more doctors and nurses or more teachers. If we keep expanding the population we need to recruit and retain more qualified people to provide extra service. You can also have too many managers or administrators. You can fail to harness new technology to cut costs. Managers in some public services multiply and impose an increasing burden on the front line workers who get diverted by management from their main task of teaching or nursing.
Good management is about supporting the front line staff. It is about keeping the costs and intrusion of management down. It is best with few layers and clear responsibility for specified and measurable tasks. A well managed organisation has low rates of staff turnover, low rates of absence , high staff morale and unity of purpose in serving the public to a high standard. Some parts of the public esrvices fall down on these criteria. Their senior managers need to be challenged as to why, and asked to improve the way they treat the staff, spend the money and achieve results.
Too many Councils and some officials in government want to price, ban and regulate the driver off the road. They spend large sums of driver taxation to thwart the driver, to delay the car, and to prevent the use of certain roads. The road authorities under provide road space on the grounds that if they supplied more motorists would dare to use it. There have always been people in government wanting to do this. The numbers have intensified now that cars are seen as one of the main causes of CO 2 emissions.
The car is one of the great liberating inventions of the twentieth century. In the age of the horse you needed to be rich to afford a horse and carriage let alone a bigger carriage with several horses. Even keeping a horse for riding or a horse for work purposes was a difficult financial commitment beyond the means of many. As the twentieth century advanced the arrival of the Beetle, the Mini and other cheaper small cars empowered the many with the personal transport privileges of the few.
Most seventeen year olds want to pass their driving test and many aspire to own their first car. It is the way to personal freedom, no longer having to plead with a parent to be given a lift to a social or sporting event. A vehicle is the foundation of many small businesses, allowing them to get the person with tools, equipment, goods and materials to any home in the country to carry out some work and earn a living. For the retired and elderly the cars and vans of modern UK are a supply line, bringing food and goods to the door, helping family and friends to visit and offering taxi rides to special events . Those who want to ban or inconvenience the car are trying to frustrate much of modern life.
Those who do it in the name of greenery may be undermining their own aims. More traffic jams bring much lower fuel consumption with delay. More traffic lights bring stop start with further fuel burn. Taxing new cars too much impedes moving more vehicles onto the low emissions standards of the modern car over the older one. Promoting electric vehicles with a high CO 2 emission to make them can also be counter productive when the person has to charge them from a grid mainly delivering fossil fuel based electricity.
Over time fuel efficiency and fuel types will evolve, and CO 2 will continue downwards. Taking more road space away from vehicles with every traffic management change, making junctions more difficult to get through, and having more traffic lights than roundabouts will frustrate the motorist, create congestion and put government at loggerheads with the many who see the car as a crucial part of their lifestyle and freedoms.