- Public sector monopoly provided free at point of use by public sector e.g. Roadspace
- Public sector provision free at the point of use with some competition between public sector providers – hospitals, schools
- Public sector monopolies provided free at point of use by private sector contractors e.g. domestic rubbish collection
- Private sector monopolies provided free at the point of use e.g. free local newspapers, certain types of internet service, ITV
- Monopoly activities provided by the public sector but paid for by users – e.g. Planning and Building Regulation services, passport issue
- Competitive services provided by the private sector but paid for by the state e.g. care homes for people without capital
- Competitive services provided by the state but paid for by users – municipal or state trading – e.g. public leisure facilities
- Competitive services paid for by users and provided by private sector – this is most public service in a free enterprise economy – everything from food to most professional services
I set out these eight hybrids to organise the provision of services in Third Way Which Way when the Blair government was seeking a third way between competitive private sector activities and monopoly state activities. They are relevant again. The government, short of cash, needs to explore more private finance for state services where people already pay user charges for the service, as with rail, Council leisure services, forestry, media, energy. Where performance is bad it needs to look at ways competition can provide a stimulus to higher quality and better value for money.
December 1, 2025
Good morning
How can the government be short of cash ? It has the monopoly on its creation and destruction (tax).
What this and previous government’s lack is self control of spending. But with so many mouths to feed, one being a single mother of four who gets £6,100 per month on benefits, no wonder i seem to have less and less the more I WORK !
December 1, 2025
Of course this government will not be looking at ‘higher quality and better value for money’.
Keir Starmer has other things on his mind. Even were he minded to investigate the topic – and it is a a big ‘if’ – fear of back bench disapproval would deter him from acting.
Any likely Labour successor to Starmer will not pursue the issue either
December 1, 2025
Alas Labour has totally the reverse agenda but so did Cameron through to Sunak before him. They want to rig the markets even further so private provision of schools, healthcare is squeezed out for nearly everyone. They rig the markets in energy, banking, education, vaccines, the legal system, healthcare, schools, universities, transport, roads, rail, rubbish collection, planning, open door immigration…plus the hundreds of dire Quangos too. Millions also wasted on delayed planning and bats and salmon.
December 1, 2025
Many of the Quangos are unnecessary and just make work for the great and good. Perhaps if we had that bonfire wecwere promised the government would have enough money.
I see it’d rumoured that the clown in No10 is exploring rejoining the Customs Union no doubt with a large up front cost and restrictions on who we can trade with. He really is a despicable character. I hope Trump is correct that he will be booted out by 2027 and there’s a General Election. The country can’t stand much more of this duplucity.
December 1, 2025
OT. John, I’ve just been reading all reports which states solar farms in the uk have a capacity factor ofc10 to 11%. We are carpeting the country with something that is useless for 90% of the time. Perhaps you’d like to follow this up.
Reply I regularly point that out.
December 1, 2025
I am experiencing first hand how utterly useless the probate office is, endless delays, no customer services, registrars who are woke and incompetent beyond belief. it’s yet another in a long line of public bodies providing service that would be laughed in any other country. add that to nhs, fca, fos, planning, schools the sheer overwhelming crap from all of them. we have army vehicles injuring our own soldiers, fighters which cannot land back on our carriers without dumping their ammunition in the sea first… its all encompassing everywhere in the public sector.
December 1, 2025
+1
December 1, 2025
thanks.
the politicians have already sacked the top layer of the probate office once, and put new people in place. that clearly has not fixed it. the politicians know it is crap but are clueless about what to do about it.
its sad really in the extreme. people being forced into poverty because of years of delay getting access to money they should inherit. its likely many people will die before they ever see their inheritances.
registrars who are not even qualified solicitors or barristers, hiding behind anonymity.
centralised systems pretending to be working out of local offices when they are clearly not.
its really needs a total and utter reset.
like so much of the public sector.
December 1, 2025
Iain
Also experienced huge delay with the Probate office myself a few years ago, then the excuse was they were modifying and moving the location of a number of offices.
The Estate in question was very simple, and just over the limit to attract Probate, with obviously no house sale involved, but even it then took 5 months of waiting.
December 1, 2025
about 2 years and counting…
December 1, 2025
Join the club
December 1, 2025
you wrote ‘providing service’ – but more often than not they don’t!
December 2, 2025
they regard shutting their phone lines every afternoon as a success… no kidding.
December 1, 2025
All public services should attract a payment to the user. Otherwise they are not valued and abused by the user.
The exceptions, being law and order and defence.
December 1, 2025
One thing worse than a monopoly (for being ripped off) is a state monopoly.
December 1, 2025
What do U mean by ‘attract a payment ‘?
December 1, 2025
User should pay Stephen
December 1, 2025
Did you forget the quangos involved in pushing forward Net Zero ideology Sir John? I am thinking the Met Office and its 103 fictitious weather stations that do not exist yet form the data base for our Climate Crisis monitoring or perhaps we could look at the Climate Change Committee and ask exactly what it does? What has it has achieved against its remit, following its establishment after introduction of the 2008 Climate Change Act. If CO2 was the devil molecule they were put in place to destroy via closure of our energy industry, they are doing very well….unfortunately. On the other hand, If their brief was to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere then I can report they have made zero difference. The onward increase in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere continues without a hint of change, now standing at 432PPM. The good news is the plants and animals across the world are all enjoying the most benign living conditions in generation The green growth is reflected in record harvests every year across the planet. Deaths from catastrophic events are at a record low level due to our advanced rescue and rapid response capabilities all founded on reliable fossil fuel energy availability. and deployment.
None of that good news is thanks to the CCC (Climate Change Committee) which was set up by Ed Miliband.
December 1, 2025
Indeed “a con job” as Trump puts it. This endlessly pushed by the BBC, all the political parties, quangos, charities, international bodies. Reform still the only party taking a sensible line, rather like the net harm Covid vaccines and net harm Covid lockdowns.
December 1, 2025
RE :
Correct.
December 1, 2025
Where in your list are ” Monopoly activities provided by the private sector but paid for by users such as Water Companies, Broadcasting transmitters, Telecommunications infrastructure”?
December 1, 2025
The Student Union Marxists in Government are engaged in a process of strangling the private sector where it offers competition to the public sector (ie schools and healthcare) and expanding public sector monopolies.
They are not interested in generating improvements in performance or cutting the cost of the services. The obsession is “fairness” …. punishing the private sector for offering a better service for those who can pay for it and targeting the individuals who may want to buy themselves a better experience.
During 14 years of Not-a-Conservative-Government they could have strengthened the private sector, for instance, by offering a Voucher System for schools and tax relief for those who use private healthcare and take pressure off the NHS. But they completely bought-in to the Blair settlement and carried on down the same disastrous route.
December 1, 2025
Indeed they should have undone all the vast damage done by Blair, Brown, Major… Just as the post war Churchill government should have undone most of the many disasters of the Attlee government.
December 1, 2025
Indeed fair competition in schools and healthcare is the way to save money and improve both. Alas the Kier, Lammy, Phillipson, Reeves loons have the reverse agenda. Medical insurance did get tax breaks under Thatcher now it has 12% IPT tax and school fees 20% vat. We want more people to pay for themselves not fewer!
December 1, 2025
Why do you claim that paying for private treatment can ‘take pressure off the NHS.’? Eventually people going private will start saying ‘why do I pay income tax to subsidise the rest of the country getting fatness jabs for nothing’?
December 1, 2025
@Donna – +1. They (that called themselves Tories) also had the authority to reverse all Blairs destruction – they simply refused. Instead chose the route of destroying the UK’s industrial base, by cancelling it and expelling it from these lands. Hence there is no wealth to pay tax to advance Society
December 1, 2025
6. Competitive services provided by the private sector but paid for by the state e.g. care homes for people without capital.
It is a scandal that people who have saved or invested in mortgages etc, to create a level of capital that exceeds a cheap end new car, should be expected to pay more than those supported in Care Homes. The going rate that private business or State organisation pays should be exactly the same as a person who has funds.
December 1, 2025
Bulk buying discount!
December 1, 2025
British people who officially retired to France before 31/12/2020 and need to be in a care home (EHPAD, Etablissement d’hebergement pour personnes agees dependantes) pay between €2.5k and €€3.2k/monthly depending on location.
How comes that in the UK the average monthly price is £5k+? Is the UK ‘service’ 56%+ better? I doubt it.
(French EHPADs are 40% public, 30% charity-owned, 30% private).
December 1, 2025
We have a lot of money to find to send to France.
No price is related to the service itself.
December 1, 2025
hefner
Try a quick internet search…subsidies for care homes in France…
It explains things.
Hope that helps.
December 2, 2025
Thank you very much. It indeed helped me to realise that the French actually care for their older people whereas in Britain it is not so obvious. That, plus potentially better weather and better food, I can understand the Brits who moved there permanently before 2020.
wis.it.com 25/10/2025 ‘How does France treat their elderly? A look into senior care’.
December 1, 2025
Correct. My Mother in law was self funded and she paid a thousand a month th more than the council figure. Out of 35 inmates only 5 were self funded and 3 were East European who’s kids brought them in.
December 1, 2025
Sadly the changes you suggest have been needed for decades John, afraid no Minister or Prime Minister, past or present, has the intelligence or will to do anything about it.
Thus they will continue to be an expensive drag on the economy and they themselves are resistant to change.
They serve one purpose to deflect the blame for poor performance from Ministers.
December 1, 2025
Private business could probably deal with most things better IF it is properly REGULATED, such as rail profit motivation and rail safety being entirely separate. Patients being allowed an individual medical budget to spend wherever they liked, with healthy family members and friends assisting with their unused balances would shake hospitals into operating better. The state props up too many failures with subsidies to continue failing.
December 1, 2025
Sorry, Sir John, but I have to disagree strongly. This Government is not short of money; it is short of common sense and judgement. What is needed is deep cuts in spending, handling taxpayers’ money with respect, and not caving in to every demand for more money from the non-productive sector.
Quangos are a financial drain, irrespective of how they are financed. So why not start there by cutting their budgets by at least 50% ( saving around £157 billion according to the Taxpayers Alliance), then cut them another 50% at the start of the next tax year. In other words, squeeze them out of existence financially. The last thing to do is set up more. The message should be first, cut spending, 2nd cut spending, 3rd cut spending, 4th cut spending, and learnt to live within our income as a country, whatever the pain that causes!
December 1, 2025
‘The government, short of cash’ ? They are good at spending without control what they have stolen you mean.
After the Budget one of the main media outlets was able to demonstrate that it was possible for some non-working citizens on benefits to be racking in around £71,000 per year while the UK’s median wage was £39,039. They might have joined in on Parliaments desire to exaggerate the World in their minds, but in detail it was shown how not working was constructed to return a greater reward than working.
Are benefits there to assist those that have fallen on hard times? or are they there to replace work and contributing to society?
Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Disability Living Allowance (DLA), Attendance Allowance, Housing Benefit, Pension Credit. are all provided Tax Free.
Benefits are paid by the Taxpayer, Tax Free means someone else is paying more tax to make up the shortfall.
There are around 34 million people of working age. A Government report says 21% of working age are not in work, that’s around 9 million, working for the State taxpayer funded around 6 million. Then we are told over 53% of the UK ‘population’, or 35.8 million people (out of the 69million), lived in households that received more in benefits than they paid in tax for the year ending March 2024.
An unsustainable merry-go-around.
To me it is not just the Government of the day, but it is the whole of Parliament that are failing to get a grip of their function. We have 650 individuals empowered and paid to protect our interest, they have failed to get a grip, failed to understand their purpose. To much time ‘free-loading’ and taking orders for the unelected unaccountable in foreign lands that don’t give a monkeys about the UK, just wishing to remove its wealth
December 1, 2025
The serious dysfunctional element to the spending of the UK’s hard-earned tax, is the bizarre idea that taxpayer money can be thrown at entities without any over-site and control. Calling something quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation that then provides services to the state at cost to the taxpayer should never mean that no elected Minister/MP is absolved from protecting the taxpayer’s money.
Whether its true or not, it’s not for me to say, but the impression given is these entities are just jobs-for-the-boys who can’t get real work in the real world – they would be otherwise unemployable. We can only judge output against the value gained against the taxpayer spend, there is no halfway house
It is incomprehensible that taxpayer’s money should be being spent anywhere without Governmental/Minister/Parliament over-site and management control on behalf of those that pay and empowered them (those in Parliament) to do just that.
December 1, 2025
Then I of course remember ED Davy the Post Office Minister, the man in charge, and knowing of the fiasco unfolding did nothing. The taxpayer is forced to payout for his mistakes to the tune of £1billion and he gets a Knighthood?
Parliament needs to get a grip, start remembering they are the Board of UK.plc as such are individually responsible for what they take from others and how it gets spent. UK.plc has got to start being in profit, creating a resilient, self-reliant future – sustainable wealth. Seemingly hard for MP’s to understand that UK.plc is competing with all other nations for the same intake of breath, as such and the contradiction, political ideology has no place in Parliament. If an MP thinks differently, in this new world they have no place or future.
December 1, 2025
The purpose of nationalisation and services free at the point of use and paid for by the state (viz by taxation) is to both destroy the wealth creating private sector and to transition to an ultra socialist system where the price of almost everything becomes dependent upon a person’s income or wealth. DESNZ has thus started the process to move energy bills (electricity costs) to general taxation writing on P28 of the recent Budget:
“The Budget is delivering a package of measures to remove around £150 of costs on average from household energy bills across Great Britain from April 2026.77 This will be delivered through the government funding 75% of the domestic cost of the legacy Renewables Obligation for the rest of this spending review period from 2026-27 to 2028-29 and ending the Energy Company Obligation which is currently funded through energy bills.”
The threefold purpose is to give the false impression that electricity costs from renewables are lower and falling, nationalise the whole energy industry and effect the “just transition” they always speak of, aka making the cost of energy a variable tied to an individual’s income or wealth.
December 1, 2025
All very true and logical, the problem we ‘all’ have is no one is listening. Political ideology and indoctrination ‘trumps’ our tomorrow, our future
December 1, 2025
Time to transform not just all the bodies that are consuming taxpayer money but the management of the State, its Government, Our Parliament, none of it is taking on the responsibility we the People entrusted in them.
On the sleight of hand front, the drive to attain more Nuclear Energy and the power stations being built are not in the hands of the UK Government, or its Parliament. 2TK signed that right over to the EU in his Reset with the EU. It is the EU that will dictate how and where they built if at all. The up and down of it is the EU has over-site and it can block all construction if it( the EU)believes it gives the UK an advantage. To that end it can order additional costs, works and restrictions to level the playing field. It wont be a UK government or parliament choice, 2TK handed the EU control, the have a lovely phrase for it in the EU called ‘The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement it contains “level playing field” provisions designed to prevent either side from gaining an unfair competitive advantage’
Isn’t what the EU tries to gain for itself, with its blocks on ‘free trade’ and tariffs – an unfair competitive advantage?
December 1, 2025
The choice to replace Rachael Reeves is making headlines once more,
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2140752/potty-mouthed-schemer-sank-rachel-reeves-brutal-plans-pensioners
He called for higher inheritance tax (IHT) on farmers and businesses. Last year, she delivered. He wanted capital gains tax (CGT) hikes. She did that too. And applied IHT to unspent pensions, as requested. …. and so on.
It is just one of the the members of the outfit that now controls Labour, all the same background all with the same aim all parachuted in by 2TK to bolster his position. Even credited with writing the budget at the behest of Starmer, RR was just the delivery ‘boy’ (or girl if you don’t understand the meaning)
More frightening reading – more tax without an economy, more tax without the earnings for it being created, more & more benefits but no left to earn
https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf
December 1, 2025
When you were in power with your big majority from 2019, it’s a shame they didn’t allocate this sort of initiative to people like you and IDS to sort it out quickly. It may have got done then. A big union-paid party isn’t going to do it. Their big paymasters are the public sector, and they want it to remain that way.
My uncle’s probate took the State two years to pass; it cost us £12,000 in a lost retirement flat sale and all the maintenance costs we accrued from his death to the sale date. It was an error, a tiny estate no more than £200,000, complete incompetence, no recourse to recover our losses. Like everything in the monopoly sector, you have to take what you’re given. We complained, but they don’t care.
There are two-bedroom retirement flats nearby for sale at £60,000; they’ve not sold in over two years because the complex has raised management charges from reasonable levels to £8500 pa, public sector final salary pensioners might be able to manage these fees plus council tax, but your average pensioner couple can’t and there is probably 2 years’ back pay to pay off, hence the low sale price. There goes the kids’ little inheritance. So nice new empty apartments sitting unused, why is the maintenance so high because part of the block is social tenants who don’t pay their full way, so the private flats have to subsidise it. What a nightmare for the kids if it goes on much longer; they’ll be paying the management fees with no return at all.
Does the passport office make a profit to return to the State? Or does it just cover wages and pensions? If we are all invested in it, shouldn’t we expect a return on that investment? If a private business ran it wouldn’t the government get capital gains tax at 25% and as the service owner a shareholder value? They certainly charge enough, and now they don’t renew from the renewal date often steal 3-6 months of passport value.
December 1, 2025
You could do a full article on Pharmacies. Mostly private businesses, but getting most of their money from the NHS. Patients having very little choice. When lots of new houses are built there is not really any incentive for new Pharmacies to open. Very little the patients can do if their local Pharmacies choose not to open on a Saturday. Very little the patients can do if the queues are massive, or the service is crap. Responsibilities for Pharmacies has moved from NHS England to the Integrated Care Board(s) (ICB’s), and they are simply not geared up to supervise or monitor them properly.
Compare and contrast to Pharmacies abroad where the quality of service is a million times better.
December 3, 2025
The worst pharmacies in my experience aren’t the independent, family-run ones that deliver prescription orders free. It is those now attached to super surgeries ‘Well’, they treat you like the NHS would, rude staff, just queue and wait there, 30 minutes later… Then they give you generic, lower-value drugs. I wonder how they even got picked for the prime slot location when other pharmacies had been open in the town for decades. Much better to hold on to your prescription and take it to a private-run shop, a supermarket pharmacy open all hours, including weekends and bank holidays but their response times are poor too or Boots.