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A new YouGov survey, which was conducted during late May 2026 with an unspecified number of UK respondents, has claimed that 82% of Britons believe water companies should be run in the public sector, with 70% saying the same of energy companies. But only 38% said the same for broadband “internet and phone providers” (16% didn’t know and 47% felt they should continue to be run by the private sector).
Regular readers might recall that the current party of government (Labour) has long since have moved away from their heavily nationalisation focused “free full-fibre broadband to all by 2030” pledge of 2019 (here and here), which raised more than a few questioning glances and a fair bit of scepticism from within the industry (here), as well as more widely.
Part of that was because the idea had missed the opportunity boat somewhat, not least since it occurred at a time when commercial builds were finally starting to flood the UK with tens of billions of pounds to help roll out FTTP (i.e. taxpayers didn’t need to foot the full bill) and appeared to misunderstand the complex interconnected structurers of the existing market / networks (BT Group didn’t hold the same grip they once did and that’s even more true today).
The questions everybody should always ask, when talking about either privatisation or nationalisation, is how much will it cost and what are the pros and cons (both approaches have their negatives). Much would naturally also depend on the detail of such a plan and its regulatory framework.
At the end of the day, it is possible to do what was proposed in 2019, but nobody should suggest that doing so would suddenly have produced a magic fix for remote rural broadband connectivity, or that there wouldn’t be significant cost, delay, legal challenges, job losses and disruption involved in that transition. For some, such radical change would still be absolutely worth it, but the industry didn’t agree.
Lest we forget that there are different ways of nationalising something, so it’s possible that the industry might have given a different reaction with a less radical approach in 2019, rather than putting a grenade to the entire market.
In any case, YouGov’s survey appears to indicate that Brits broadly support the current telecoms market being part of the private sector, although this isn’t to say that they agree with everything. For example, above-inflation mid-contract price hikes remain a widely disliked practice. But you don’t need nationalisation to solve that, just a government willing to push Ofcom in the right direction (this hasn’t happened).