Public Services – Public Ownership This session was led by David Hall, Director of the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU). The PSIRU supports the global union federation for public sector workers, the Public Services International (PSI), with research and data. He is also Principal Lecturer in the International Business and Economics Department at Greenwich University, London. It started with some debate about whether services deliver better to the public if they are publicly- or privately-run, with participants giving examples from their own countries. In truth, David Hall said, research shows no direct correlation between who runs the service and the standard of that service. But we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘efficiency’ or ‘effectiveness’. They are not the same thing, and we must ask who benefits the most. Do we rate services ‘successfully delivered’ according to their contribution towards overall ‘economic development’, or rather by the extent to which they improve the quality of life for the majority of the people? Do we factor, for example, environmental sustainability into our idea of what is an ‘efficient’ service? Access to food, water, and health are universal human rights, as Peter Rossman of the IUF pointed out. They are essential to human life and it is not the mission of the private sector to provide them. ‘Efficiency’ is here not an appropriate concept. “It is not like the production of cars or i-pads”, he said. Social democrats, with their promotion of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), did not get this right. PPPs were born in the UK, and are now spreading globally, spurred on by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its quest to reduce public expenditure. The group discussed how selective the private sector is about which services it will take on. In much of Africa, private companies are not interested in running the electricity supply because most people are too poor to pay. Meanwhile, in wealthy but mountainous
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