“Ultimately, the future of our public services comes down
to a question of power: who owns them, who controls them
and whose interests they serve.”
Kim Johnson MP wrote a piece for the Socialist Campaign Group’s 2026 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’. You can read the pamphlet in full below.
For over forty years, Britain has been subjected to a failed economic experiment. Under successive Tory governments – and too often accepted by New Labour – the doctrine of privatisation and outsourcing has fundamentally reshaped our economy. Public assets have been sold off, essential services fragmented and democratic control steadily handed to private corporations.
Repeatedly, we were told these economic choices would deliver efficiency, innovation and better outcomes. Instead, the reality has been rising costs, deteriorating services, insecure work and billions of pounds of public wealth flowing into private profits. Far from modernising Britain, privatisation has become the defining economic failure of our time.
Its consequences are visible across almost every aspect of daily life.
Our railways are fragmented, expensive and unreliable. Water companies have become symbols of corporate failure synonymous with pollution and excessive executive pay. Energy bills have soared while private firms have recorded extraordinary profits. Telecommunications, gas and electricity were sold off in the name of competition, yet consumers continue to face rising costs and inconsistent service.
Housing tells a similar story. The sale of almost two million council homes dramatically reshaped our housing system, reducing the supply of genuinely affordable homes. Decades later, those homes have never been replaced, contributing to chronic shortages and spiralling rents.
Even those services that remain publicly funded have increasingly been hollowed out through private finance initiatives and outsourcing. Across local government, schools, prisons, probation and large parts of the NHS, private contractors have become embedded in delivering essential services. More recently, major NHS data contracts awarded to Palantir have raised profound questions about transparency and ethics within our health service.
Across the board, the outcome has not been efficiency but opacity, weakened accountability and billions siphoned off into the pockets of shareholders and the super-rich.
This disastrous model has also reshaped our labour market itself. Outsourcing has driven down pay, eroded terms and conditions, and replaced secure public employment with precarious contracts. Whether in cleaning services, transport, or parts of health and social care, workers are too often treated as disposable costs rather than essential public servants.
Public services should always serve the public – not private profit.
Labour’s commitment to deliver the “biggest wave of insourcing in a generation” marks an important break from this failed orthodoxy. Bringing services back in-house provides an opportunity to reverse decades of fragmentation and rebuild public institutions that are directly accountable to the people they exist to serve.
The recent agreement to bring thousands of facilities management staff back into the Civil Service demonstrates what can be achieved when there is political will. Workers benefit from improved job security, fairer pay, better conditions and greater dignity at work. The public also benefits from services that are delivered directly rather than filtered through layers of commercial contracts and confidentiality clauses.
Insourcing is not only good for workers – it is good economics.
Every pound spent on shareholder dividends, executive bonuses, management fees and procurement costs is a pound diverted from frontline services. Public bodies, by contrast, can reinvest every pound back into improving services, strengthening communities and investing in their workforces. The economic case for insourcing is therefore matched by a democratic one.
Britain’s challenges demand a far more ambitious programme of public ownership, and water is perhaps the clearest example of why. Around 90% of the world’s water systems remain publicly owned because it is recognised that access to clean water should never depend upon generating returns for investors. The privatisation of England’s water industry has been an unmitigated disaster, allowing water companies to extract billions while accumulating enormous debts and failing to invest adequately in infrastructure. The consequences of such failures include leaking pipes, polluted rivers and coastlines, repeated sewage discharges and ever-rising customer bills.
The same principles apply across other sectors that shape everyday life. Energy, transport, housing and strategic infrastructure should all form part of a wider programme of public ownership. This is not about nostalgia for a bygone era of state ownership. It is about building modern, efficient and democratically accountable institutions capable of meeting twenty-first-century challenges, such as the climate crisis, regional inequality and our chronic productivity problem.
Achieving that ambition also requires a different approach to economic policy
For too long, our political debate has been constrained by self-imposed and self-defeating fiscal rules that have prevented government from making the long-term investments our economy desperately needs. Instead, public ownership should be pursued as part of a bold strategy to rebuild our productive capacity. Labour’s 2017 manifesto recognised this through proposals for a National Investment Bank – that principle remains as relevant today as it was then.
As socialists, we have always understood the difference between borrowing to fund day-to-day spending and borrowing to invest in assets and services that generate long-term economic and social returns. Borrowing to build infrastructure, create publicly owned energy, modernise our transport systems, construct council housing and strengthen public services is not irresponsible – it is how a prosperous nation invests in its future.
That is why insourcing, public ownership and borrowing to invest are all interconnected parts of how we restore democratic control over the economy.
After forty years of failed economic dogma and neoliberal policies, it’s clear that another model is necessary: one where wealth created by society is used to benefit society; where workers are respected rather than treated as expendable; and where essential services are organised around public need, not shareholder return.
What we are missing is the political drive needed to direct our collective wealth towards the public good.
Labour’s first steps towards insourcing should be welcomed – but we must push for a more radical transformation. Britain remains one of the most regionally unequal and economically imbalanced countries in Europe. Reversing that imbalance demands a renewed commitment to public ownership and strategic investment to shape markets and deliver prosperity that is shared rather than concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.
Ultimately, the future of our public services comes down to a question of power: who owns them, who controls them and whose interests they serve. The answer should always be the people, through a programme rooted in the best tradition of British socialism.
- Kim Johnson MP is the MP for Liverpool Riverside. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
- You can read the SCG pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’ in full here. The foreword says that “We hope this contributes to a debate across the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider movement about the political programme needed to deliver the change people voted for, to build a better future for our communities and to prevent the rise of a Trump-style government here in Britain.“
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