Following the death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 it seems rather appropriate to re-examine privatisation, one of the former prime minister’s most significant policies. A new round of privatisations are in the offing, with Royal Mail at the top of the ‘for sale’ list. Also, with government borrowing and debt becoming such a major issue in recent years, the UK government has started to give private companies more freedom to operate in the public sector, even if outright privatisation is not possible or practical.
Privatisation is the transfer of assets or economic activity from the public sector to the private sector. Privatisation is not merely the transfer of state-owned nationalised industries into shareholder-owned public limited companies, although that accounts for much of it. Privatisation also involves the contracting out to private companies of services previously run in-house by local authorities and the National Health Service (NHS), such as refuse collection and hospital cleaning and catering, as well as the running of prisons and prisoner transfers by companies such as G4S.
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