We Own It's lead campaigner sets out the need to end the privatisation rip-off
Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, as Green Party leader Zack Polanski has rightly pointed out, has been 40 years in the making.
Much of it is a result of decisions made by Margaret Thatcher and subsequent governments to sell off key public services, which we are now paying through the nose to use. In his speech at the New Economics Foundation today, Zack Polanski pledged to end privatisation, to end “rip-off Britain”.
A key plank of his plan to end rip-off Britain is to end what has been termed the “privatisation penalty”. The privatisation penalty is, in effect, how much more it costs the public to use public services because those services are privatised. To quote Zack Polanski, “The wealth of those who own those precious assets – the ones sold out from under us under Thatcher, and then sold back to us for profit. Their wealth – it’s skyrocketed”
He is absolutely right. Royal Mail was privatised in 2013, and first-class stamp prices have risen by 124% since 2020. Water was privatised in 1989, and our water bills have gone up by 350% in cash terms between 1989 and 2023. Rail was privatised in 1994, and our fares are now the highest in Europe.
Privatisation has enabled the wealthy few to exploit our basic needs for profit. While our bills skyrocket, shareholders are filling their pockets with gold. We cannot tackle the cost-of-living crisis without dealing with privatisation, whether it is in water, energy, rail or the NHS.
By treating our water system as an ATM, profiteers have decimated our rivers and seas, severely endangered public health and continually disrupted our access to this basic human need. The water companies have loaded up those companies with £82 billion in debt, while extracting £85 billion in shareholder dividends. We must end water privatisation.
Successive governments, over the last 15 years, have actively undercut the NHS with privatisation, taken away our ability to access care and sold that care back to us through the private sector. This has forced 1 in 5 people to use private healthcare in 2025. Even within the NHS, the number of NHS services provided by private firms has increased, allowing them to make £10 million in profits per week. Now the government wants to bring back private finance initiatives, which will only benefit investors at the expense of patients and the NHS. We must end NHS privatisation.
And despite promises to bring rail into public ownership, the government’s rail reforms will allow private firms to extract billions in dividends from owning and running our trains. The rolling stock companies that own our trains have paid out £1.16 billion in dividends to their shareholders since 2022. And “open access” operators, who cherry-pick the most profitable routes, syphon out up to one-third of our fares in profits. All while Britain has the highest fares in Europe. We must truly end rail privatisation.
To fix the cost-of-living crisis, we must begin the process of unwinding the damaging sell-off of our British family silver. This will allow profits to be kept in the system and used to cut bills and improve services – instead of going into private shareholder pockets.
We Own It has been leading this fight for years. Right now, we are campaigning to end Thames Water privatisation as well as making sure the government’s Railways Bill truly delivers public ownership. Sign up to join us in this fight.
Johnbosco Nwogbo is a lead campaigner at anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It
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