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Don’t confuse municipal ownership with control
Roger Davies (You Write, August) and I are in agreement on regulation: public transport exists to serve the interests of those who use it, not to give dogmatic satisfaction to politicians who cannot let go of their obsession with (re)gaining control.
However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between privatisation and deregulation. They are not one and the same thing, despite the confusion in most political minds, nor does one of necessity require the other.
Like Roger, I worked in the nationalised, private and municipally owned sectors. In my case, I am in no doubt that I served customers best in the municipally owned sector. Note municipally owned, emphatically not municipally controlled, as this was within the framework of deregulation: that was the key to the delivery of a good service an…
