12 February 2014
A letter to Labour leader Ed Miliband, from the British public
Dear Ed,
We're really happy to hear that you want us, the people, to power public services. We want to have a say in how public services – from the NHS to schools – are run, and work together with staff to make them better. It's great that you want to make public services accountable to the people they serve. We ask you to commit to a Public Service Users Bill in Labour's election manifesto to make this happen.
The Bill would mean we would be consulted about our services and whether we want them privatised or outsourced (79% of us want this). We would have information about private contractor performance which is currently cloaked in 'commercial confidentiality'. We'd have a right to recall providers when they do a bad job (supported by 88% of us). Public ownership would be the default, there would always be an in-house bid, and organisations with a social purpose (cooperatives, social enterprises, charities) would have a better chance of winning bids than organisations focussed on profit.
But we need you to go much, much further towards real people-powered public services.
According to YouGov, 68% of us want energy companies in public hands and 66% of us believe the railways should be in public ownership. 84% of us want a publicly-run NHS, and 67% want a publicly-run Royal Mail. We ask you to commit to putting these public services in public hands where they belong.
Public ownership isn't a panacea. Like you say, we need bottom up, people-powered services where all of us are listened to and get a real say. But the best framework for supporting and building that involvement is public ownership, not a privatised, unaccountable, bureaucracy, a G4S-Serco-state. We reject default privatisation by 10:1.
Ownership matters. When services are in public hands, it's easier for us to make them responsive and accountable to us, so they keep getting better over time (see 'Better in Public Hands' for examples). Plus, profits can be reinvested in improving services, instead of being drained off to private shareholders. We want truly accountable public ownership, which is about people, not top-down control.
Let's create a brighter future for our public services and work together to make them genuinely people-powered.
Best wishes
The British people
