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The collapse of Carillion shows how the private ­sector has failed Britain, ripped off the taxpayer and betrayed the workers.

Once again a major failure of Britain’s construction industry, banks and Government threatens the provision of public services and thousands of jobs because of the insatiable greed of big business.

Carillion’s demise brutally highlights the failure of finance and accountability commissioned by Government in a highly controversial outsourcing policy which produced massive private profits and director bonuses and the nationalising of its cost and losses.

We now know there were no meetings between the company and senior ministers in the months after it issued its first profit warning – and went on to get six government contracts, including two worth £1.4billion to help build HS2.

Carillion is yet another example of an institution arrogantly believing it was too big to fail, just as we saw with the private banks in the 2008 global financial crisis.

Governments, including my own, failed to enforce proper accountability for the taxpayer’s interests in blind pursuit of outsourcing, driven by ideology where private provision and competition is far better for delivery.

I noticed from my period in government, responsible for the Department of Transport, a number of big companies getting together to reduce competition and secure public contracts.

The first example was the collapse of the private company building HS1, the high-speed link to the Channel Tunnel, which failed to convince the private finance market it had sufficient money to finish the job.

They tried to force me to give them another £2billion or the project would collapse. Instead, I took it back into the public sector. I funded the gap in finances by bond financing, which the Treasury was always opposed to.

Another example was modernising the London Underground. The Treasury insisted on three companies to run the project.

It led to the collapse of two of them, unable to meet contractual requirements.

It took taxpayers’ money to rescue the deal. Another example of privatisation of profit and nationalisation of costs.

The ideological obsession by this Government to get private companies to run public services now makes no economic sense.

The East Coast Line was nationalised after two private companies were unable to deliver it.

It was then sold to Virgin and Stagecoach for £3billion, only for Transport Secretary Chris Grayling to let it get out of its contract when it failed to deliver.

This is cheating the taxpayer out of £2billion.

We need to fundamentally reconsider how we finance and run public services and construction projects when the private sector clearly cannot deliver.

Public services must be produced and delivered by public bodies alone.

Labour is right to let failed private sector contracts back under local authority and NHS control.

Perhaps we should go back to the provision of golden shares in companies in which taxpayers’ money is involved, like we did when we nationalised RBS.

We need a rethink on how we provide public services and the financing of them, and have much greater accountability.

The taxpayer has subsidised poorly performing private companies who fail to deliver a public service for far too long.

Carillion’s demise shows that it is time to take back control of our public services for good.