The Era of Privatisation :: Business Management Studies

The Era of Privatisation presentmentIt was down the stairs the Thatcher government that the era of privatisationstarted and it was the most radical change in the 20th centuryBritish politics ( schoolboyish, 2001, p. 1).From 1984 to 1991, the telecommunications, gas, water and electricityindustries which were under government control, were sold to becomeprivately owned and controlled.The privatisation of the electricity attention occurred in 1990 but hadalready begun in 1987 with the creation of a class describing thedifferent tasks involved in privatising the generation, transmissionand distribution of electricity.According to Young (2001), the appreciable number of privatisations tooshie be explained by the intention of up the efficiency and amore economic reason concerning the proceeds of the flotation. As faras the case of electricity is concerned, David Parker (1999) arguesthat the main reason was to crowd competition and that all theproducers of the four activities (generat ion, transmission,distribution and supply), could be divided into scatter corporationsresponsible for each activity and open to competition.After the privatisation of the electricity effort, a regulatoryoffice was created, the Office of Electricity Regulation - also cogniseas Offer. The need for regulatory bodies such as Offer can beexplained for example by the requirement of preventing unfaircompetition when some(prenominal) companies work in the alike(p) fields or providecustomers the same service, or the need to protect the work force.Moreover, as Parker argues it can pass international attention.This essay will firstly attempt to explain the government agency of theelectricity industry before 1997 and the changes it was subjected to,then it will identify the order office responsible for thisindustry and the role it plays, and finally it will foreground thebenefits and the drawbacks of this regulation.I- The situation of the British electricity industryA) A historic com e off up to 1997 The early daysAs John Surrey (1996) explains, the Electricity industry existed forabout 150 years and it has always required a imprint of regulationespecially when the technology started progressing. The first model ofregulation were acts of decree taken for example after the FirstWorld War, in 1926, by the Conservative Government to establish theCentral Electricity Board as the owner of a national grid (Surrey,1996, p. XV).Some of the issues were solved, such as the voltage distributionbetween the different regions but others remained, like theconsiderable numbers of suppliers. All these considerations tend toexplain the nationalisation of the industry in 1948. PrivatisationState control lasted forty years until 1989, however the need to get on competition in generation and in retail electricity supply,and to break the transmission from the generation, led the Thatcher