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Act Now: Public Utilities

A visual representation of the issues involved in Public Utilities
"Act Now: Public Utilities" by the Common Sense Policy Group is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

This chapter highlights the decades long failure of an ideological experiment whose results are clear. Privatisation of public utilities is an aberration that can only be sustained by subsidising profits, paying more in bills, accepting dependence on fossil fuels and receiving poorer services in return. Not only have our assets been stripped, we are paying for the privilege of bailing out failing companies, many of which are based overseas and represent the interests of other states. There is no good economic justification for this. We present an obvious alternative: ownership of our natural resources and public control over their use. In the report, we set out a programme of democratic reform that will prevent our assets being misappropriated again, ensuring that we can bring our energy and water back into public ownership in a pragmatic programme oriented around removing the subsidies and acceptance of poor performance that sustain private companies. In complementing the Green New Deal, we show that the sustainable transition is in all of our interests and can only be achieved through a combination of investment in renewables and planned direction of natural resources. National self-sufficiency is key to tackling the cost-of-living crisis and preventing it from ever reoccurring.

Recommendations

In the report, we have a full list of steps to bring our energy and water back into public ownership. In sum, government should:

  1. Immediately begin to create the organizations needed to bring our utilities back under democratic, decentralized public control.
  2. Trigger notice periods immediately, legislate to cut those down to short transition periods, then buy back the National Grid and regional distribution centres, and British Gas and rename as Great British Energy, and create a new publicly owned energy generation company and invest in it at £28 billion per annum – the same level as Labour’s 2021 commitment –, via the National Investment Bank.
  3. Work towards a national surplus of, and self-sustainability in, electricity generation to make electricity affordable and decoupled from wholesale gas prices and make decarbonisation actively attractive to the country.
  4. Ban the extraction of new coal, oil and gas and plan for a speedy (2-3 years) complete transition to renewable energy.
  5. Trigger the English water companies’ 25 year notice period, legislate to cut that timeline down to a short transition periods, take failing water companies into special administration on financial (debt) and service grounds, use steep equity fines to punish other water companies that perform poorly and, under public ownership, invest in infrastructure at large scale to reduce leaks and waste.
  6. Protect all workers affected by the sustainable transition through the Quadruple Lock plan we outline as part of the Green New Deal.
  7. Introduce progressive billing where users get a guaranteed amount of energy paid for and heavy users pay more.