Welsh Journals

8. BUS DEREGULATION IN RURAL WALES: AN INITIAL RESEARCH NOTE Philip Bell and Paul Cloke BUS DEREGULATION IN ITS WIDER CONTEXT The realignment of relations between the state sector and the private sector has been one of the most important changes in the political economy of Britain during the Thatcher years. There have been strong moves by the government to install private-sector, market-oriented management in various elements of production and consumption which were previously the responsibilities of the public sector. This switch to the private sector has occurred in a variety of forms (Heald, 1984; Peacock, 1984). These include: (i) privatizing the payment for a public- sector service, so that funding from taxation is replaced by some form of user-pays; (ii) the contracting out of responsibility for providing some services which remain under broad public-sector control; (iii) a denationalization of state-owned industries; and (iv) a deregulation of private-sector services which previously were subject to regulation by the state. In Britain, these policies of privatization have been introduced with a mixture of New Right ideology and political pragmatism (see Blowers, 1987; Dunleavy and O'Leary, 1987). Because there have been a range of goals inherent in the programme of privatization, it would be unwise to suggest that there have been ubiquitous impacts of changing relations between the private and the public sectors. Nevertheless, it has been suggested elsewhere (Bell and Cloke, 1987) that rural areas may be regarded as poor arenas of competition and, therefore, that disadvantaged rural residents may well receive a negative impact from