Ian Byatt

Last updated

SirIan Charles Rayner Byatt (born 11 March 1932) is a British economist who was the Director General of the economic regulator of the water industry in England and Wales, Ofwat, from its creation at the time of the privatization of the water industry in 1989 until 2000.

Contents

Education

He was educated at Kirkham Grammar School. He graduated from Oxford University, obtaining a doctorate with a thesis entitled The British electrical industry, 1875-1914 and Harvard University. [1]

Career

Ian Byatt was Head of Public Sector Economic Unit (1972–78) and then Deputy Chief Economic Adviser (1978–89) at Her Majesty's Treasury under Margaret Thatcher. Other posts included HM Treasury 1962-4; LSE 1964-7; Dept of Education and Science 1967-9; Ministry of Housing and Local Government 1969-70; DoE 1970-2; HM Treasury 1972-89; Central Council of Education 1965-6; CNAA 1968-70; ESCR 1983-9; HM Treasury 2000-2. [2]

During his tenure as water regulator he was responsible for a substantial price reduction imposed on private water companies in 1999 that sent the share prices of these companies tumbling. Critics have also argued that instead of price cuts, it would have been better to fund improvements to the quality of water company discharges to rivers and the sea.

He then joined the newly created economic consulting firm Frontier Economics. From 2005 to 2011 he was the Chairman of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, the economic regulator of the Scottish water industry. In 2012 he criticized the Thames Tideway Scheme as unnecessary and argued that private firms should not receive the massive subsidies they have requested to finance the scheme. [3]

He was knighted in the 2000 Birthday Honours. Byatt is a member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group which disputes the science behind global warming. [4]

Publications

The British electrical industry, 1875-1914: The economic returns to a new technology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, ISBN 9780198282709.

He recently self-published a collection of articles on the regulation of water companies entitled A Regulator's Sign-off:Changing the Taps in Britain

Personal life

He was born in Preston Lancashire, the son of Charles Rayner Byatt and Enid Marjorie Annie Byatt. [2] He married the novelist A.S. Byatt ( née Drabble) in Northumberland in 1959. They had two children: one girl and one boy. [2] Ian and AS Byatt divorced in 1969. [2] He married secondly Professor Deirdre Annie Kelly on 12 December 1997 in Birmingham. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nigel Lawson</span> British peer and politician (1932–2023)

Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, was a British politician and journalist. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as Member of Parliament for Blaby from 1974 to 1992, and served in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet from 1981 to 1989. Prior to entering the Cabinet, he served as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury from May 1979 until his promotion to Secretary of State for Energy. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 1983 and served until his resignation in October 1989. In both Cabinet posts, Lawson was a key proponent of Thatcher's policies of privatisation of several key industries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Law (economist)</span> Scottish economist

John Law was a Scottish-French economist who distinguished money, a means of exchange, from national wealth dependent on trade. He served as Controller General of Finances under the Duke of Orleans, who was regent for the juvenile Louis XV of France. In 1716, Law set up a private Banque Générale in France. A year later it was nationalised at his request and renamed as Banque Royale. The private bank had been funded mainly by John Law and Louis XV; three-quarters of its capital consisted of government bills and government-accepted notes, effectively making it the nation's first central bank. Backed only partially by silver, it was a fractional reserve bank. Law also set up and directed the Mississippi Company, funded by the Banque Royale. Its chaotic collapse has been compared to the 17th-century tulip mania parable in Holland. The Mississippi bubble coincided with the South Sea bubble in England, which allegedly took ideas from it. Law was a gambler who would win card games by mentally calculating odds. He propounded ideas such as the scarcity theory of value and the real bills doctrine. He held that money creation stimulated an economy, paper money was preferable to metal, and dividend-paying shares a superior form of money. The term "millionaire" was coined for beneficiaries of Law's scheme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HM Treasury</span> Ministerial department of the UK Government

His Majesty's Treasury, occasionally referred to as the Exchequer, or more informally the Treasury, is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for developing and executing the government's public finance policy and economic policy. The Treasury maintains the Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting (OSCAR), the replacement for the Combined Online Information System (COINS), which itemises departmental spending under thousands of category headings, and from which the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) annual financial statements are produced.

The private finance initiative (PFI) was a United Kingdom government procurement policy aimed at creating "public–private partnerships" (PPPs) where private firms are contracted to complete and manage public projects. Initially launched in 1992 by Prime Minister John Major, and expanded considerably by the Blair government, PFI is part of the wider programme of privatisation and financialisation, and presented as a means for increasing accountability and efficiency for public spending.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ofwat</span>

The Water Services Regulation Authority, or Ofwat, is the body responsible for economic regulation of the privatised water and sewerage industry in England and Wales. Ofwat's main statutory duties include protecting the interests of consumers, securing the long-term resilience of water supply and wastewater systems, and ensuring that companies carry out their functions and are able to finance them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Director of Naval Construction</span> Former senior post in the British Admiralty

The Director of Naval Construction (DNC) also known as the Department of the Director of Naval Construction and Directorate of Naval Construction and originally known as the Chief Constructor of the Navy was a senior principal civil officer responsible to the Board of Admiralty for the design and construction of the warships of the Royal Navy. From 1883 onwards he was also head of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, the naval architects who staffed his department from 1860 to 1966. The (D.N.C.'s) modern equivalent is Director Ships in the Defence Equipment and Support organisation of the Ministry of Defence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">North Eastern Electric Supply Company</span>

The North Eastern Electric Supply Company was responsible for the supply of electricity to a large amount of North East England, prior to the nationalisation of the British electricity industry with the Electricity Act 1947. The company was established as the Newcastle upon Tyne Electric Supply Company in 1889, but was renamed the North Eastern Electricity Supply company as it expanded to supply the North East region.

Operation ROBOT was an economic policy devised by HM Treasury in 1952 under Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler but which was never implemented. It was named after three of its civil servant advocates, Sir Leslie ROwan, Sir George BOlton and OTto Clarke.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a 700-page report released for the Government of the United Kingdom on 30 October 2006 by economist Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE) and also chair of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) at Leeds University and LSE. The report discusses the effect of global warming on the world economy. Although not the first economic report on climate change, it is significant as the largest and most widely known and discussed report of its kind.

Public water supply and sanitation in the United Kingdom is characterised by universal access and generally good service quality. A salient feature of the sector in the United Kingdom compared to other developed countries is the diversity of institutional arrangements between the constituting parts of the UK, which are each described in separate articles, while this article is devoted to some common issues across the United Kingdom.

Ruth Jane Lea, Baroness Lea of Lymm, is a British parliamentarian and pro-Brexit political economist.

The role and scale of British imperial policy during the British Raj on India's relative decline in global GDP remains a topic of debate among economists, historians, and politicians. Some commentators argue the effect of British rule was negative, and that Britain engaged in a policy of deindustrialisation in India for the benefit of British exporters which left Indians relatively poorer than before British rule. Others argue that Britain's impact on India was either broadly neutral or positive, and that India's declining share of global GDP was due to other factors, such as new mass production technologies or internal ethnic conflict.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Scholar</span> British civil servant (born 1968)

Sir Thomas Whinfield Scholar is a British civil servant who served as Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 2016 to 2022. He was previously the prime minister's adviser on European and global issues in the Cabinet Office from 2013 to 2016. He has been a director of the nationalised bank Northern Rock, and served as chief of staff for Gordon Brown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Kingdom enterprise law</span> Law of public services and big business regulation in the UK.

United Kingdom enterprise law concerns the ownership and regulation of organisations producing goods and services in the UK, European and international economy. Private enterprises are usually incorporated under the Companies Act 2006, regulated by company law, competition law, and insolvency law, while almost one third of the workforce and half of the UK economy is in enterprises subject to special regulation. Enterprise law mediates the rights and duties of investors, workers, consumers and the public to ensure efficient production, and deliver services that UK and international law sees as universal human rights. Labour, company, competition and insolvency law create general rights for stakeholders, and set a basic framework for enterprise governance, but rules of governance, competition and insolvency are altered in specific enterprises to uphold the public interest, as well as civil and social rights. Universities and schools have traditionally been publicly established, and socially regulated, to ensure universal education. The National Health Service was set up in 1946 to provide everyone with free health care, regardless of class or income, paid for by progressive taxation. The UK government controls monetary policy and regulates private banking through the publicly owned Bank of England, to complement its fiscal policy. Taxation and spending composes nearly half of total economic activity, but this has diminished since 1979.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase toxic assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. It was a component of the government's measures in 2009 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.

In the period September 2007 to December 2009, during the events now widely known as the Global Financial Crisis, the UK government enacted a number of financial interventions in support of the UK banking sector and four UK banks in particular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Sassoon, Baron Sassoon</span>

James Meyer Sassoon, Baron Sassoon, is a British businessman and politician. After a career in the financial sector he served in various roles in HM Treasury, the UK's finance ministry, from 2002 to 2008, at which point he began advising David Cameron on financial issues. From May 2010 to January 2013, Sassoon was the first Commercial Secretary to the Treasury and was appointed to the House of Lords as a Conservative. In January 2013, he became an executive director of Jardine Matheson Holdings and of Matheson & Co. He is also a director of Hongkong Land, Dairy Farm and Mandarin Oriental and chairman of the China-Britain Business Council.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Financial Conduct Authority</span> British financial regulator

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is a financial regulatory body in the United Kingdom which operates independently of the UK Government and is financed by charging fees to members of the financial services industry. The FCA regulates financial firms providing services to consumers and maintains the integrity of the financial markets in the United Kingdom.

The 1999 Queen's Birthday Honours to celebrate the Queen's Official Birthday were announced on 7 June 1999 in New Zealand and Niue, and on 12 June 1999 in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melanie Dawes</span> British economist and civil servant

Dame Melanie Henrietta Dawes is a British economist and civil servant. Since February 2020 she has been Chief Executive of Ofcom. She was previously the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and before that worked at HM Treasury, HM Revenue and Customs, and in the Cabinet Office. She is a Trustee of the Patchwork Foundation, founded by Harris Bokhari.

References

  1. "Ian Charles Rayner BYATT". Debrett's. Retrieved 4 September 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Whoswho (1 December 2023). "Whos Who".
  3. "Thames Water is obliged to fund big projects". Financial Times. 11 November 2012. Retrieved 4 September 2014.
  4. Fisher, Michael. "Global Warming Policy Foundation". DeSmog. Retrieved 28 January 2022.