New nationally representative polling on public attitudes to private ownership of, and rent extraction from, the buildings and other assets of schools, hospitals and councils
Jason Bunting and Mike Lewis | 26 October 2026
Contents
Analysis: Finding the radical centre
Summary
Public-sector buildings and infrastructure assets, from care homes to prison buildings, ambulances to GP surgeries, are increasingly owned by wealthy investors who do not provide public services but simply extract rent from them. This model is incentivised by tax breaks originally intended to promote productive investment and protect family businesses, which are instead being used by private equity funds and High Net Worth Individuals to pay themselves offshore, circumvent UK tax on rents, and shield assets from inheritance tax.
This extractive model of providing capital for the public realm makes public services – which can benefit the most vulnerable – dependent on transfers of wealth upwards from taxpayers.
New polling commissioned by the Fairness Foundation and TaxWatch finds consistent opposition to this model. Six in ten respondents think that public buildings should generally be in public hands. Only 6 percent of respondents agree that private companies should be allowed to own these buildings and make a profit from renting them to government or local council.
There is no political constituency for the status quo. Across all voting intentions, ages, income, region, ethnicity, educational attainment, employment and housing status, people prefer public provision and ownership of public assets. This is the centre-ground of UK political preference and unites otherwise divergent constituencies: left-wing voters, Reform supporters, North and Midlands regions of England, and the devolved nations.
Opposition to the status quo is principled, not merely pragmatic. Forty percent of respondents reject the private build-and-leaseback of public-sector buildings like schools and hospitals, even if it offered value-for-money, cost the government less than if they had built/bought themselves, gave discounted rents for the public sector compared to the private sector, or had a cap on permissible profits. A maximum of 13 percent of people considered private build/leaseback to be acceptable with any of these positive outcomes for the public finances.
The only significant divergence of opinion is by age. Younger adults (18–34) are more permissive of private ownership and rent extraction than older cohorts. This pattern mirrors generational differences found in separate research on attitudes towards tax avoidance, and opinions on extractive rather than wealth-creating business models. Granular research is sorely needed to find out whether young people’s views on economic ethics, and the value of public goods, really are fracturing from the rest of our society – and why.
Analysis: Finding the radical centre
Who should own what in our economy? Who should profit? Who should pay tax and who should not?
These are sometimes seen as key political dividing lines. Voters and politicians can be located on the political compass by their different visions of how wealth and assets should be distributed – and redistributed – across society. Margaret Thatcher’s radical vision of privatization, for instance, still acts as a talisman for a particular political pole that considers holding public assets in common to be inefficient or even unfair; while believing that the state and the tax system should, as far as possible, get out of the way of people’s ability to profit from private wealth and assets, and to pass them down generations.
Conversely, advocates of a wealth tax see a starved public realm as something to be repaired on the backs of the (massively disproportionate) shoulders of the super-rich. Meanwhile supporters of nationalizing rail and water want to stop disproportionate wealth accumulation being fuelled in the first place by money from the public realm – which they see increasingly as a playground for private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure tycoons.
But we can get too caught up in the drama and noise of these political cleavages. In their interstices, there are surprisingly broad swaths of consensus. This research shows one such area, where people actually agree a lot: about who should own and make profits from the ‘things’ of public services, from children’s homes to hospital buildings, prisons to rubbish trucks.
It’s already well known that the public strongly oppose private ownership of utilities. Ours is the first polling we are aware of that has asked people what they think about a narrower and more complex issue: private rentierism in the public sector, particularly through property. Perhaps surprisingly, the results are no less clear and consistent.
The status quo
These kinds of public-sector assets have in recent years become millionaire-makers. There are ‘care barons’: wealthy business owners and investment funds farming estates of residential care homes, their fees and rents funded in part by councils’ ballooning social care budgets – and in some cases paid out to tax havens via ingeniously-structured offshore loans, as forthcoming TaxWatch research will show. The Times recently reported on an investment fund that is financing fleets of ambulances and CT scanners which it rents back to the NHS, whose publicly funded lease payments also somehow qualify as an inheritance tax shield for its wealthy individual investors, using a tax break originally intended to protect family businesses being broken up when a parent dies.
These investors aren’t in most cases providing public services themselves. They’re simply providing capital to buy or build the infrastructure and property within which those public services take place and extracting rents from them.
Though it has roots in the privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s, the growing prevalence in the last decade of these private asset owners and landlords across the public sector – fuelled by tax exemptions contorted a long way from their original purpose – hasn’t really been an ideological choice by governments of any party. Instead, it’s a tired exigency of the public realm’s disrepair. If the state can’t (or won’t) provide or borrow enough capital for the capital spending that services need, then private providers of capital may seem like the only option, even if it may be more expensive for local authorities and taxpayers in the long run. The result is a cross-current of equality and inequality: conditioning public services – that undoubtedly benefit the most vulnerable groups in our society and counteract some of their disadvantage – on transfers of wealth upwards via rents from taxpayers and ratepayers to some of the wealthiest people in our society.
This Faustian bargain has been baked into every government of the last twenty-five years. And yet, overwhelmingly, voters don’t like it.
In detail
People don’t want the infrastructure and buildings that public services run on to be owned by someone charging rent for them. That’s true across every age group, political affiliation, region, income band, social class, ethnicity and housing status.
Respondents were asked to think about buildings used by public services, such as schools, hospitals and fire stations, and given three options (along with a ‘not sure’ option):
- Private companies should be allowed to own these buildings and make a profit renting them to government or local councils
- Private companies should be allowed to own these buildings, but the profits they make from them should be limited
- Buildings used by public services should generally be owned by the public sector rather than private companies.
Those in favour of public ownership of public-sector buildings outweighed those who accepted either model of private ownership by 35 percentage points.
Just 6 percent opted for what is the status quo (where, for instance, PFI deals leave building ownership in the hands of private contractors for decades, and occasionally even after the end of the contract).
Six in ten, meanwhile, said straightforwardly that public buildings should be in public hands. And this was the most common answer in 49 of the 50 groups into which we were able to break down respondents. (The only exception was employment status, where unemployed people were more likely to say “don’t know” than anything else).
We should be a little cautious about over-claiming universality, since some of the smaller categories had relatively small numbers of people in them. Nonetheless the broad consensus is clear. Voting intention makes some difference, with Lib Dems and Greens more in favour of public ownership than voters for other parties. But other demographic splits like education and sex make no meaningful difference. Even educational attainment, sometimes seen as the great new political divide especially for right-wing politics, made no difference: across all education levels, 58 percent support public-sector buildings being generally in public ownership.
Renting back schools and hospitals
To check whether this is simply wishful thinking in an era of public capital scarcity, we also wanted people to think through different options for managing private rent in the public sector.
Asked to imagine a school or hospital being built by a private company and then rented back to the government, respondents were asked to say whether this was acceptable
- If it costs the government less than building and owning the asset directly…
- If the government gets a discount (i.e. the company charges the government less rent than it would charge comparable private schools or hospitals) …
- If it provides good value for taxpayers…
- If profits the company can make are limited…
- …or whether publicly funded schools and hospitals should simply not be owned by private companies.
Even within this advantageous framing, only 40 percent of people find private ownership of school and hospital buildings acceptable in some form. Only 10 percent accept private ownership simply on the basis that it provides “good value for taxpayers”. The other 30 percent attach a condition on price or profit. Legislation has only recently created a power to cap profits and only for children’s homes and fostering agencies. And an equal 40 percent would prohibit private ownership even with various kinds of value-for-money advantages or profit restrictions. Prohibition of private ownership remains the largest single preference amongst all ages, regions, social grade, and housing situation, education and ethnicity. People care not only about the cost of rent extraction from public sector assets, but the principle of it too.
There is markedly more opposition to private ownership of public-sector buildings in the devolved nations and the regions than in London.
In short: opposition to unconstrained rent extraction from the public realm – even where it offers cost savings for the government – is a strong preference across all the otherwise contradictory groups and places where the current government needs to take votes from others in order to win in 2029.
Concrete thinking
We also wanted to know what happens when people think concretely about particular public sector buildings and assets. So we asked people about public and private ownership of nine specific public sector ‘things’, from council houses to bin lorries. For none of them are more than a fifth of the public in favour of private ownership.
The asset for which people are most permissive of private ownership – care homes – tops the list at 18 percent. At the bottom are ambulances and fire engines, with just 9 percent support for private ownership. Over a third (35 percent) of people reject private ownership for all of them, while just 38 percent would allow private ownership of even one of these assets.
Hove Town Hall (Hassocks5549/Wikipedia CC0)
Again, party-political affiliation and demographic categories matter relatively little here: though Reform voters are more likely (35 percent) than Conservatives (26 percent) to say no to private ownership across all nine ‘things’, with Reform voters squarely on the national average on this question.
A generational split
Preferences for public ownership and against public-sector rent extraction are strong across all groups. But there is one clear demographic gradient of opinion here: age.
Older people are consistently strongly opposed to private ownership and rent extraction from public sector assets. But looking across the different age groups, the real outlier are 18-34 year olds (yellow in the chart below). Only 27 percent of this age group rejected private ownership of all nine ‘things’, compared to 42 percent of 50-64 year olds (grey), and 37 percent of those over 65 (black).
On every one of the nine assets we asked about, the youngest group is more willing to allow private ownership than older groups. Strikingly, the age gradient is biggest for two public-sector ‘things’ where young people have recently or are likely to use the asset in question: school buildings and hospitals.
Likewise, 50 percent of 18–34-year-olds find it acceptable for a private company to build and own a school or hospital and rent it back to the government – mostly with conditions attached – against between 35 and 39 percent of older age groups.
We shouldn’t exaggerate how comfortable young people are with private ownership and rent extraction from the public sector. 48 percent of 18–34-year-olds think buildings used by public services should generally be owned by the public sector, and this is still the most common answer by this age group to the ‘models of ownership’ question we asked (see Figure 1 above), although 18–34-year-olds are the only age cohort where this is not the majority view in our poll. It should also be acknowledged that the generational attitudinal gap is in part increased by more older people answering ‘don’t know/not sure’.
Nonetheless the consistency of this age gradient needs unpacking, in ways our polling can’t do. Perhaps older respondents, able to recall when buses and bin lorries had council logos not corporate ones, have a nostalgia (or a wider sense of political possibility) from their past experiences, while 18–34-year-olds have only known the eras of privatization and PFI. Perhaps younger people have lower expectations of the value and effectiveness of state ownership, in a period when younger people are getting less from the state than previous generations, and less than current older cohorts: from the pension triple lock, to the dominance of social care spending in council budgets. Age could also be linked to the impact of housing status on attitudes to public ownership, with only 47 percent of private renters saying that public buildings should generally be publicly-owned, compared to 63 percent of homeowners.
We don’t know, and these underlying sentiments need to be explored further. These findings also match a wider unmooring of young adults’ views from the political centre across other economic questions. For instance, in January this year the Fairness Foundation commissioned research asking people about the acceptability of eight imaginary avatars representing different business models of wealth creation and extraction (‘makers’ and ‘takers’), from tech start-ups to online retail platforms, drug developers to private utilities. Here too, we found that younger people are much more relaxed about the extractive business models than older adults. Net disapproval of the imaginary water company with a natural monopoly was 24 percent, compared to 66 percent of those aged 65+. Young adults are also slightly less supportive of business models based on real innovation.
On some questions, this divergence of economic ethics seems to be widening across time. Earlier this year, for instance, we analysed HMRC taxpayer polling since 2018 on the acceptability of tax avoidance and evasion. In 2024, 31 percent of 16-34 year olds said that it is ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ acceptable for people not to tell the tax authority about all of their income (tax evasion), while only 17 percent of people aged 35 or above thought so. Back in 2018, only 23 percent of 16-to-34-year-olds (and 15-17 percent of older age cohorts) thought that such non-disclosure/tax evasion was ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ acceptable.
Similarly, in 2023, 29 percent of 16-to-34-year-olds said that it is ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ acceptable for people to exploit tax loopholes (tax avoidance), compared to 21-24 percent of people in older age cohorts. In 2018, only 24 percent of 16-to-34-year-olds thought that this was OK, compared to 16-19 percent of people over 35.
On questions of private ownership of public-sector assets, however, the age gradient tends to have a centralizing effect on public opinion. For instance, older voters’ preferences for public ownership potentially counteracts more neoliberal sentiments amongst some parts of the Reform vote, bringing Reform voters’ opinions as a bloc squarely to the national centre. (It may also explain in part why London, with a more youthful population, is markedly more comfortable with private ownership of public assets than other regions).
Conclusion
There is no political, demographic or geographic constituency for private ownership and profit from the physical fabric and infrastructure of the UK’s public services.
This includes young adults, less than a quarter of whom supported private ownership of any one of the nine ‘things’ we asked about.
Nonetheless we should not ignore the fact that young adults’ opinions are significantly more acquiescent to private profit from public goods than the rest of society. Whether related or not, this divergence mirrors differences between those under- and over-35 on questions of economic ethics: including opinions about rentier business models, and tax compliance.
It is tempting (and worrying) to see in all these divergences an unmooring of young adults from a public realm, and a wider economy, in which extraction and upwards transfers of wealth seem inevitable. Why should young people care about the exploitation of public goods, or be supportive of paying taxes to fund them, when they get less benefit from the state than previous generations of young people, and than current generations of older ones?
The truth is that we don’t know whether young adults’ social solidarity really is fracturing. And if it is, we don’t know at what age it starts to be pronounced, or what might be driving it. These are some of the most urgent questions in UK politics.
Nonetheless, for now, there’s unambiguous and near-universal political benefit from ‘radical centerground’ policies to restrain or end private extraction from public-sector assets: whether through tax rules, procurement regulations, or public finance frameworks.
What the Government can do
The polling gives the Government a mandate to act on two levers:
- Close tax reliefs that reward rent extraction from public services. Review how reliefs intended to protect family businesses and encourage productive investment are being used to shelter publicly funded lease income from inheritance tax and UK tax on rents.
- Set conditions on private ownership of public-sector assets. Only 10 percent of the public accept private build-and-rent-back on value-for-money grounds alone; 30 percent would accept it only with price or profit conditions; 40 percent would rule it out entirely. Parliament has only recently created a power to cap profits in children’s homes and fostering agencies. Ministers should use it and extend the principle to other publicly funded assets such as care homes, including the rents charged by the companies that own the buildings.
About this polling
Opinium interviewed 2,050 UK adults aged 18+ online between 26 and 28 August 2026, weighted to be nationally and politically representative. Opinium is a member of the British Polling Council.
Breakdowns
Results cover 50 groups across 13 characteristics, including voting intention, 2024 and 2019 vote, EU referendum vote, age, region, household income, housing tenure, social grade, working status, education and ethnicity.
Small bases
Northern Ireland (47 respondents) is indicative only. Wales (78), 2024 Green voters (90), the unemployed (106) and households over £100,000 (115) warrant caution.
Multiple answers
The nine-asset question allowed more than one answer, so its percentages do not sum to 100.
About us
The Fairness Foundation is a UK think tank working for a fairer distribution of wealth and power. TaxWatch is an independent think tank investigating tax avoidance and its impact on public finances.