Alyson Macdonald is an opinionated wee nyaff who lives, works and agitates in Edinburgh. She’s a regular guest contributor at Bright Green, and has recently found herself involved in a campaign against the privatisation of local public services.

Sources inside the City of Edinburgh Council have warned that the Council plans to hold a crucial vote on 27th October to decide whether to privatise services such as waste and recycling, council tax collection, parks, building maintenance, cleaning, and school catering. Under a project known as the Alternative Business Models Programme (ABM), the Lib-Dem/SNP-led Council have been investigating whether to put vital services out for tender since December 2009.

If you live in Edinburgh, you may be wondering why you haven’t heard about any of this. The simple answer is that the Council don’t want to advertise what will most likely be a very unpopular policy. Neither the Lib-Dems nor SNP mentioned it in their manifesto during the last local elections, and there has been almost no public consultation. In fact, it’s been rather difficult for anyone to get a definite idea of exactly which services were under threat of privatisation until quite recently, because much of the information was classed as “commercially sensitive” and wasn’t available to the public. Over the last few months, details have started to trickle out, including the fact that council officials have already been in negotiations with possible contractors, and that some of the companies have previous convictions for price-fixing, or have been found responsible for fatal accidents.

We are being told that these services need to be privatised in order to save money, but, in practice, for-profit companies rarely provide better value for money. The initial bid might seem like good deal, but the hidden extras stack up quicker than on a Ryanair ticket, whether it’s for additional services, or the costs associated with managing and auditing contractors. The experiences of councils in England, where privatisation is more common, stand as a warning of what can happen when services are run by private companies who measure their success by their profit margin, rather than the amount of public money they’ve saved. Liverpool Council awarded the contract for their IT and customer services to BT in 2001 in the hope of reducing costs, but they’re being overcharged by around £10M per year, and, on top of that, they’ve run up six-figure bills investigating BT’s practises – only to discover that it would be cheaper to run the services in-house.

Even if privatisation does save money, the savings would come at the expense of local jobs. Under the ABM proposals, up to 4000 jobs would be transferred from the public to the private sector, which could mean lower wages and fewer benefits for staff. It could also lead to redundancies as the companies try to cut costs by shedding jobs or relocating back-office functions to their headquarters in another part of the country.

Then there is the question of accountability: if services are run by external companies, how much control will the council have, and how will local residents be able to influence service provision? At the moment, if you have a problem with any council services, you can take it up with your elected representatives, or use public pressure to encourage change, but it’s more difficult to use that pressure on a company, especially when they’ve signed a long-term contract. The contracts that the Council are negotiating now are likely to last for several years, and with local elections due to be held next spring, that means the contracts will probably outlast the current administration. Even if the politicians responsible are voted out in 2012, it we wouldn’t be able to get out of the deals they’d made without paying millions in cancellation fees.

If we leave it until the elections, it’s too late; which is why there have been neighbourhood campaign groups springing up across in the city in the past few months. So far the aim has been to confront the secrecy around the Alternative Business Models Programme by getting information out to as many people as possible. Volunteers have delivered leaflets, or knocked on doors and talked to their neighbours about the proposals. Some people have even arranged public meetings where residents can ask their councillors about ABM; I attended one such meeting at Meadowbank back in July, and found it quite worrying that the councillors who had been sent along to defend the proposals had knew so little about them, and could only offer a few platitudes about austerity and competition to their constituents, who were overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of privatisation.

Now that the date of the vote is only a few weeks away, the campaign is picking up pace, and although we are still trying to get information about ABM to as many people as possible, we’re also putting pressure on councillors to vote against the proposals by making group visits to councillors’ surgeries. Labour and Green councillors have already stated their opposition to privatisation (although it’s worth remembering that the previous Labour administration of the Council were hardly reluctant to sign us up to expensive PFI contracts), but they don’t have sufficient numbers to block the proposals while the Lib Dem, SNP and Conservative groups are all in favour. We know that we won’t get anywhere with the Tories, so efforts are being focussed on the SNP and Lib Dems, to persuade them to reconsider. The proximity of the elections works in our favour here, because a councillor who wants to be re-elected can’t afford to support policies that their constituents don’t want. We need to remind them that it is their job to represent the people who elected them; not to force their ideas on us.

I’m under no illusions about the state of our public services: many of them could be better, and they

should be improved wherever possible, but privatisation will not deliver improvements, and it won’t – as David Cameron suggests – give residents more control over services. The only people who will benefit from privatisation are the private companies, and they’ll do it at the expense of service users and taxpayers. It’s time for us to remind our councillors who they work for.