Professor Mildred Warner at Cornell has researched thousands of utilities all over the world, and found no systematic difference between public and private, one way or the other.
having as as privately owned utility controlled by a strong regulator should be a good option - where the government operates as a supervisor of quality and service
This is what's wrong with healthcare: HMG is funder, provider, regulator, inspector, investigator and prosecutor of the NHS. With HMG marking their own homework like that, there's little surprise that there's no accountability, and we have one scandal after another.
Here's an example of the sort of thing I mean, this is paragraph 7.69 of the PHSO (Health Ombudsman)
Service Model Main Guidance:
So there you have it, if the bank robber tells the judge he's now stopped robbing banks, he gets off scot free.
And this is what that leads to, a PHSO caseworker, who's supposed to be an independent investigator, emailing the NHS Trust under 'investigation' coaching them on what to say:
Just good old-fashioned corruption.
The PHSO were
referred to the Met Police on 32 counts of Misconduct in Public Office a few years ago, but the investigation had to be abandoned because the Police have
no power of access to PHSO records. Why not? Well Hansard answers that question, here's the Parliamentary debate relating to the original creation of the PHSO:
“The Bill was always drafted to be a swiz, and now it is spelt into the Bill…………Anyone who contemplates an office of this kind is faced with the dilemma of making it either a Frankenstein or a nonentity—a Frankenstein if it has effective powers and a nonentity if it has not. The Government, quite rightly, has opted for its being a nonentity, and in that sense it is a fraud……… I congratulate the Government on its being a nonentity. A Frankenstein would, I think, have undermined the power of Ministers...... it is a noble facade without anything behind it”
Hansard, 24th January 1967
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/jan/24/clause-5-matters-subject-to-investigation
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/jan/24/schedule-3-matters-not-subject-to
The Ombudsman is a fraud because Parliament wanted it to be.
That the state is not exactly well known for its ability to run big organisations is clear from the way the NHS is run and interfered with, the delays and overspend on major projects, or the well documented struggles to deliver major IT systems.
Not to mention the serial scandals. Just keep parroting
"Lessons will be learnt" until the fuss dies down, then go back to business as usual.