29 Jun 2026
Last month we invited people to sign and comment on our open letter to Andy Burnham asking him to commit to policies supporting public ownership. So far more than 8,000 people have signed. Add your signature and comments.
Dear Andy Burnham,
Thank you for calling openly and persuasively for public control of life’s essentials. It is absolutely brilliant to hear you challenging the failed privatisation of the past 40 years - this is desperately needed. Public ownership is extremely popular with all voter groups, including both Reform UK and Greens as well as Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative voters.
As you know, We Own It set up the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign that pushed for regulation of the buses for the first time since Thatcher. We salute your unprecedented success with the BeeNetwork and recognise that you took a stand and successfully faced down the private bus companies in court to stand up for the people of Manchester.
In recent days you have called for stronger public control of energy, water and transport. Public ownership in these sectors is eminently affordable - zero or low net cost - through a combination of:
- Insourcing contracts wherever possible as they come up for renewal, as the government has already done with rail franchise
- A new fair wages resolution so that outsourced workers have the same terms and conditions as public sector workers, making it possible for example, for NHS trusts to be able to run care services
- Creation of new publicly owned organisations like Great British Energy, which can be done without compensating shareholders
- Regulation of the private sector to hold it accountable for failing to invest or deliver, for example forcing utility companies to account for their neglect and damage to essential infrastructure on balance sheets
- Normalising the licences of water and energy networking companies which currently have 25 year notice periods(!); reduce these, for example to three months, in line with rail companies under franchises
- Use of legislation and legal procedure like special administration to defend the public interest, as when the Blair government nationalised Railtrack and stood up to shareholders
- Expanding the scope of the British Steel legislation to cover all critical national infrastructure that supports the economy, and communicating clearly about which services and assets fall under this category, and which do not
- Accounting that correctly recognises the money saved by acquiring profitable assets which have a guaranteed revenue stream from our bills. For example, research shows that bringing the privatised water companies into public ownership could cost as little as £14.5 billion, according to the Financial Times, and would create savings of £3 billion to £5 billion a year
- Understanding of the wider context in terms of the current level of national debt (£2911 billion); the money spent on bank bailouts in 2007-9 (£137 billion); and the pandemic (£310 to £410 billion). In comparison, Thames Water’s £17 billion debt (which could be further reduced by a debt haircut of upwards of 40%) would be considered ‘trivial’ by the bond markets, as would the cost of around £3.6 billion to buy back Royal Mail
- Bond market reforms that increase options for the government, for example changes to the way the Bank of England works or requirements for UK pension funds to invest in gilts, as proposed by economics professor Daniela Gabor.
We are writing to ask you to clarify whether you support policies to:
- Bring water into public ownership, starting by immediately bringing Thames Water into permanent public ownership and then using regulation to force the other privatised English companies to meet their licence conditions, bringing them back as they collapse or fail to do so
- Bring energy into public ownership, specifically, at the very least, providing a publicly owned retail option for households and developing a plan to bring the energy grid (transmission and distribution) companies one by one into public ownership as soon as possible
- Make public ownership of rail franchises a success by prioritising public interest duties like the environment and accessibility instead of outdated competition law, introducing publicly owned rolling stock as leasing deals come up and giving rail passengers their own democratic “union” and representation on the board of Great British Railways
- Enable both public control and public ownership of buses all around the country, including setting up a publicly owned bus company for Greater Manchester (like the very successful Lothian Buses and Reading Buses) to increase its success still further
- Phase out private profits in the NHS and invest in building up the NHS’s own capacity instead, including saying no to new Private Finance Initiative style deals, ending the deal with Palantir and defending the UK’s right to set its own drug prices
- End profit in care of vulnerable children (following the example set by Wales) and older people
- Bring the Royal Mail into public ownership, improving letter deliveries and putting household representatives on the board of the company
- Deliver on the Labour Party’s promise to deliver the “biggest wave of insourcing in a generation”
We recognise that this is no small task. These policies will take time to implement and will need to be delivered in a sensible way, at a sensible pace, in a sensible order. However, the existing Labour government has met with private sector groups 23 times more often than it has met with consumer groups and charities and capitulated to private interests, so trust cannot be assumed.
We are asking for reassurance about the direction of travel - please will you confirm your position on the policies mentioned above? We would love the opportunity to meet with you to discuss this. There is a whole movement which wants to support you on this if we can be confident that you will hold the line for people, not profit.
