31 things the current UK government have privatised or want to privatise

1. child protection services
2. the probation service
3. the royal mail
4. emergency calls to the fire service
5. the land registry
6. the NHS blood service
7. Eurostar
8. large swathes of the school system
9. significant policing functions
10. the motorway network
11. the met office
12. ordnance survey
13. companies house
14. student loans
15. the behavioural insights team
16. Remploy
17. the NHS
18. forests
19. Lloyds
20. the courts service
21. the prison system
22. English Heritage
23. the Defence Equipment and Support agency
24. Food and Environment Research Agency
25. the BBC
26. the royal mint
27. HMRC
28. the forensic science service
29. the policing of parliament
30. job centre plus
31. The Government Pipeline and Storage System

The list would be much longer if it included New Labour. How far will this go…?

My criteria for inclusion on the list are that a service has been privatised, has been subject to an attempted privatisation or that a putative privatisation has been discussed in the media. The concept of ‘privatisation’ is a bit inaccurate when applied across the list but I don’t think this detracts from the underlying point. There’s some quite specific qualifications which could be attached to many of the entries on the list but this isn’t the place for them. I was just interested to fuzzily map the scope of the privatisation agenda, getting beyond the drip-feed of news stories about particular services to try and think about the size of the broader trend.