The Financial Times has written a piece on the new ASI paper “Utility Gains: Assessing the Record of Britain’s Privatized Utilities”, explaining how the paper finds that there is no benefit to nationalising utilities.
Utility privatisation in the UK is “not perfect” and benefits for customers are not obvious, but shareholders and the government have done well financially from it and investment has surged, a leading free market think-tank has concluded. In an attempt to rebut criticism about the benefits of privatisation voiced by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Adam Smith Institute has drawn up a paper examining the sale of electricity, gas, water, the railways and telecoms in the 1980s and 1990s.
A new Adam Smith Institute paper, “Utility Gains: Assessing the Record of Britain’s Privatized Utilities” assesses the various utility sales of telecoms, gas, water and electricity companies during the 1980’s and 1990’s and looks at how government, shareholders and customers fared since the privatisation process.