Why Are We Selling Our Utility Companies?
While the UK has long been able to depend upon a massive flow of oil and gas from the North Sea, it seems that over the last 20 years we have sold off the ?family silverware?. Slowly but surely the UK utility market has become dominated by overseas companies with the French ruling our water companies and the Germans and Americans our electricity supply ? even many of our oil reserves are now controlled by overseas companies. Is this a big mistake?
When you take a look at the current trend in the energy markets it seems that successive governments may have made mistakes by not protecting our very own utility companies and we are now being made to pay the price. But can we really complain if we boast about the open market policy which has been present in the UK for many years?
While we cannot really complain about the US companies who have ?raided? our markets, as we have done similar to their markets, the German and French situation is very much different. The French and German utility and energy companies are protected by law and overseas ownership is not allowed resulting in what many see as a very unfair situation. Our utility companies are affectively being bought up by state funded companies from markets in which we cannot easily operate.
To make matters worse the current trend of rising energy and utility costs is having a major impact upon the UK economy and while many struggle the foreign owned utility companies seem to be announcing higher and higher profits. But what can be done about the current situation?
The utility sector is supposed to be heavily regulated in order to avoid companies profiting at the expense of their customers (or at least to avoid substantial price increases). Whether this current regulatory regime is working is debatable, but there is no doubting that we never see our charges come down as quickly as they go up!
