25 years ago, I was working for my local council on what was supposed to be a brief two week contract.

For whatever reason, council bosses had been convinced a particular department could be run more efficiently if privatised.

The existing database management system was being upgraded to new system via this third party, of which they were paying about £8million (about $15million) just for the custom database software alone, plus ongoing support contracts, training, etc.

Further, the entire department was now suddenly no longer employed by the council (after 20+ years in some cases), and now all staff had new private contracts with this third party company, who also charged the council agency fees for ’employing the specialists’, on top of the regular wages of the staff, all of whom still sat at their same desks, and were still paid the same salary, with the same job roles.

The new database system was supposed to be rolled out in three phases over just two weeks, and so they employed me and someone else, both at just over minimum wage, to manually manage client applications, filing, etc. for the ‘brief period’ of the new database installation during the ‘two week rollover’.

6 months later, I quit. They hadn’t even installed phase one of the new database system.

So for my ‘just over minimum wage’ job, on the fly I’d had to build and maintain my own custom client records database for 15,000 clients, to track the dozen or so stages of their respective benefit applications, with codes, filters, keys for other staff to understand, and to generate reports to chase missing application parts, share records with the respective staff at various stages of their process, and make it remotely accessible whilst also being secure, etc.

So yeah, when someone tries to claim privatisation is better, it’s only better for the profit of the shareholders, not for anyone else.

I’ve seen first hand what a complete waste of money privatisation can be.