Dear friends and colleagues,

I hope this finds you well.

I’m writing to share our first report on the impact of privatizing essential services, this one on the human impact of bus deregulation Britain.

The report finds that the government’s decision to privatize and deregulate the bus sector in England outside London, Scotland, and Wales over the past three decades has failed passengers and undermined their rights, delivering a service that is expensive, unreliable, and dysfunctional. People have lost jobs and benefits, faced barriers to healthcare, been forced to give up on education, sacrificed food and utilities, and been cut off from friends and family while the Government’s new bus strategy merely tinkers with the existing system, offering ineffective half measures that fail to address the structural cause of the crisis.

I have attached the report, press release, and a comparison of the government’s claims about privatization in 1984 versus its assessment of the system today.

It’s also available at https://chrgj.org/2021/07/19/press-release-public-transport-private-profit-the-human-cost-of-privatizing-buses-in-the-united-kingdom

We’re also speaking with transportation organizers at an event on Wednesday July 21 at 7pm, you can sign up here: https://alstonbusreport.eventbrite.com/

And as always, you can sign up for updates from our project here: http://eepurl.com/g1wURf

We hope you find it useful, and would be delighted to discuss in more detail.

Best,

Bassam

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Bassam Khawaja

Co-director, Human Rights and Privatization Project

Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law