Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
1–10 of 478 posts
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#2Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories?
Does any country have any success stories?
I can’t think of any.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#3I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean).
It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but that part I didn’t check).
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#4Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Japan’s rail privatization was extremely successful and it’s considered one of the best rail networks in the world now.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#5Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1]
And they actually continue to expand their service.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#6Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
It's hard to measure this.
British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly?
Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#7Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex".
If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.
This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#8Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines?
There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works.
Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#9Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too.
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.
MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#10Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1] And they actually continue to expand their service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.