Privatisation - appears not to work?

I have just been reading about the fiasco going on with a waste disposal company who has been collecting hospital waste, and then storing it at four different sites rather than incinerating it as they should be doing - Criminal probe over medical waste

Now, this to me seems to be a completely failed attempt at privatising a part of a public service? Part of the article that really gets me is the line that states that the company concerned had "previously highlighted the need to invest in the UK's "ageing" incinerator network for clinical waste" - - forgive me here, but if they are the company that has said they will take on the contract to dispose of the waste at their sites, then surely it is their infrastructure that is ageing and therefore up to them to invest in new infrastructure? If you took out a contract with a local taxi driver to take you to and from work every day, would he expect you to pay for a new vehicle a few years down the line because his 'infrastructure' was getting old???

It seems to me that things like this are being farmed off to the private sector who in turn suck as much money as possible out of it before running it down to the point of being disfunctional, and then when they are found out it is the public purse that pays to tidy up the mess, meanwhile the business has bodged it up can simply go bust and that is the end of that. Invariably, it is the public that end up picking up the tab, whilst the fat cats wander off with the profits!

 

So surely it is better to accept they are services, not for profit, and at least we are paying only for the services and not the profits and dividends? Yes, British Rail, the water, gas and electricity boards were disfunctional, but now we have those sort of service privatised, they are still disfunctional whilst also seeing people make great wadges of money out of it

 

Is it though? I have lost count of the number of board meetings I have sat in where we managers have been told that "we are in profit, but the parent company/shareholders are looking for another million, so we can't spend on...." Personally, I don't even blame the Directors of these companies, although it does incense me when it is 'the managers' that are the ones supposedly milking it and being on some gravy train - - in my experience, it is the directors that do the most of the travelling around the world etc, and even then in my experience not one of them was milking anything. I blame the shareholders. When a business says to their parent company/shareholders that they predict they will make a certain amount of profit in a year, and then the parent company/shareholders respond that it is not enough, which then results in cuts being made - how, exactly, is that the managers fault?

 

I think the gravy train excuse was one that appeared in the Thatcher era, and it may well have applied in those days - but we are not in those days any longer. The gravy train nowadays seems to me to be in government, with a reluctance to change things like this to protect their own interests.

@pete - I remember, back before they Olympics, I was putting my budget together which included staff costs and anticipated income amongst other things; I was aware that there was absolutely shed-loads of roadworks in that year as part of the prep for the Olympics, so I curtailed my anticipated income accordingly and submitted my budget.

It was refused, and I was told to go and re-do it no less than three times, with my boss telling me on the last one to basically put in the numbers that they wanted to see, and not what I was realistically going to achieve. Suffice to say, I never achieved budget that year, and when I compared the figures that we did achieve with my original submission, we actually made more than that submission. To me, it was all about avoiding paying the manager's bonus, which was a bloomin' insult, given that I earned less than the people I was in charge of.

Something has to change though, as there are so many failures of this sort in relation to our public services, and the common theme is a select few people making shed-loads of money, making a right mess of things, and then going bust, leaving the public to pick up the bill (having already paid that bill, and the profits!)

 

Well, that company lost their contract - NHS waste scandal firm loses contracts