Funnily enough, transparency and accountability are higher under government control than corporate control.
Not necessarily so.
I mean, we just found out that Johnson & Johnson had been lying for years about the presence of asbestos in baby powder!
How much impropriety in government atomic energy research has been hidden? Medical experiments? Drone wars? Etc. Neither form of ownership by itself provides of a guarantee of transparency. Private ownership has the advantage of having the regulated and the regulator not being controlled by the same entity.
That's an important and often overlooked point.
One point from the Cullen Report into the Piper Alpha disaster was that the Department of Energy was responsible for both encouraging exploitation of the North Sea as well as regulation of safety of the industry. Clearly this was a conflict of interest that led to a lax attitude to safety.
An outcome was that these functions were split up with the HSE taking responsibility for regulating safety and a separate ministerial department, which changes its identity once a fortnight, responsible for exploitation.
The thing is that the main drivers that cause the private sector to he reckless with safety also applies to the public sector. The public sector may not have profits to worry about, but it does have budgets.
What's more the complacency of believing you'll be able to get away with it anyway can be even stronger in the public sector where there are no consequences to getting it wrong. I'm always befuddled when I hear NHS trusts have been fined for failures. What good is that going to do? Shareholders at least notice fines if they're strong enough.
But my original point was that NATS don't operate at Her Majesty's Pleasure so an impasse on supply won't affect them (well not as fundamentally anyway).
