The UK is the third-most expensive country in the world for childcare. At age four, Jessica’s older brother, Daniel, attends a nursery run by the largest nursery chain in the UK, which is majority owned by one of the world’s largest institutional investors. Even with their entitlement to 30 free hours of childcare a week, the nursery charges nearly one third of Ava’s take-home pay.

As of 2021, 70 per cent of group-based day nursery places in England were run for profit, with those backed by large investment firms yielding especially high gains. In the same year, nearly one-fifth (18 per cent) of group-based nursery staff in the UK aged 23 and over earned below the National Living Wage.

According to experts, the result of the increasing financialisation of childcare is a system that funnels public money and family payments to institutional investors and private equity firms. These companies are known to operate without transparency about their use of public funds, and avoid serving poorer areas as these are less profitable.

Jessica’s cousin Rachel is in her final year of university in London where she faces university tuition fees of £9,535 per year — among the highest in Europe.

With 40 per cent of universities facing budget deficits and the increasing marketisation of higher education, we have a system where universities must increasingly compete like businesses. In this context, students like Rachel face challenges including grade inflation, expanding student numbers, staff cuts and the closure of less commercially viable departments. Marketised universities divert resources from teaching and research into marketing and property development.  

Rachel’s student accommodation isn’t owned by the university but by a FTSE 100 company which reported £213.8 million in earnings last year, while Rachel’s rent (which was already greater than the maintenance loan available to her), rose by 8.2 per cent.

Rachel commutes on buses run by the Bee Network, Manchester’s transport network of buses, trains and trams which was brought back into local control in 2023. In its first year of operation, the Bee Network has seen increased passenger numbers, more reliable services and fares capped at £2 per journey.

The Bee Network’s success as a public transport network stands in sharp contrast to the vast majority of communities across the UK with privatised and heavily deregulated bus services, which have seen bus fares more than double in real terms since privatisation in 1987.

When Rachel wants to visit her university friends back in London, however, she has to pay rail fares that have risen by 40 per cent on average across the UK in real terms since privatisation. Overall, privatised rail costs British taxpayers at least £31 billion more in profits and other costs than public ownership would.  

Between 2017 and 2024, 103 per cent of train operating companies’ post-tax profits were paid out in dividends to shareholders. In 2022-2023, the rolling stock companies (which lease trains and carriages to operators) saw their profits treble, with more than £400 million paid to shareholders and profit margins rising to a massive 41.6 per cent.

Jessica’s parents, Ava and James, live in Rusholme, a suburb of Manchester, and are in stable employment. Despite this, they struggle to afford life’s essentials.  Their water comes from United Utilities, who paid out £1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders over the last five years while announcing that they will be increasing bills by 32 per cent over the next five years. It is a similar story across the UK — £85.2 billion has been paid out in dividends since the privatisation of England and Wales’ water system in 1989, all while not one new major reservoir has been built.  

United Utilities alone lost more than 175 billion litres of water to leaks in 2023-2024 and dumped more than 140 million litres of untreated sewage into Lake Windermere between 2021-2023.

The Williams’ electricity and gas come from British Gas, owned by Centrica, who have made £8.5 billion in profits since 2020, while energy bills soared by 278 per cent between 2020-2023 (the height of the energy crisis). Even though the acute energy crisis of 2021-2023 has ended, there is still a crisis of affordability: average bills are still 65 per cent higher than they were pre-crisis and almost a quarter of the typical 2024 energy bill was taken as pure profit.  

The energy networks — which transfer gas and electricity from generators to homes and were once publicly owned — operating in the North West have made a combined profit of £14.6 billion since 2020:

Like many families across Britain, of all the rising costs that the Williams family faces, their shopping bill is one of the most difficult to manage. The overall price of food and non-alcoholic beverages rose by 25 per cent between 2022 and 2024, compared to only nine per cent over the ten years prior, while household income decreased between 2022 and 2023.

In July 2025, 59 per cent of adults in the UK reported that their cost of living increased compared with the previous month. Of those whose cost of living has gone up, 95 per cent said it was because the cost of food shopping had risen (and 57 per cent said it was because their energy bills had increased).

While families up and down the country struggled with high food prices, the two largest supermarket chains, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, paid out £1.2 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2023.

Beyond the squeezing of cash from public services through privatisation and worsening labour market conditions, the extraction of profit by large corporations and investors touches nearly every aspect of daily life and leisure for the Williams family: from the high street to the football pitch to the vet.

This section explores these areas and shows how profiteering has been placed above community and collective life.

Despite a terrible year on the pitch, the Williams renewed their season tickets to Manchester United — which Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest billionaire, recently took a 27.7 per cent controlling stake in.

The club tells a story of how ownership can radically change an institution. In 2005, the Glazer family took over the Manchester United through a leveraged buyout — when a company is purchased using primarily borrowed money, typically using the company’s assets as collateral.  This transformed the club’s financial structure in ways that burdened supporters and destabilised operations. The club was saddled with £660 million in debt secured against its assets, with annual loan repayments exceeding £60 million — money paid for out of ticket prices that could have gone to improving the club.

The leveraged ownership model transformed fan payments into debt servicing to fund the owners’ acquisition, while simultaneously contributing to the pricing out of traditional supporters through rising costs.

Because of competition from online shopping and out-of-town retail parks, their local high street suffers from empty shops. The bank closed some time ago and although there are good hairdressers, charity shops and takeaways, it is hard to avoid the feeling that things have steadily gotten a little worse. Meanwhile, what remains of the big high street brands is falling into ever fewer hands, as companies such as Frasers consolidate their high street empire.

But a different model is thriving locally. Nearby, the Fallowfield Library and Community Resource Centre was transferred to community ownership in 2016 and is a vibrant community space offering a wide range of services and activities. Elsewhere in the Manchester suburbs, places like Station South — a neglected Victorian train station — has become a cycle café, urban garden and community space, showing the benefits of community ownership.

At 52, Jessica’s uncle Theo has started thinking more seriously about retirement. His workplace pension invests his monthly contributions into a portfolio that includes the very companies extracting profit from other aspects of his life.

He doesn’t know it, but Theo’s pension helps fund the water company that pollutes their local river, the property firms driving up his children’s rent and the private healthcare providers filling gaps left by NHS cuts.  

Private equity firms in particular benefit from pension fund investments in outsourced public services like social care and foster care. They use high leverage and financial engineering such as sell-and-rent-back schemes to increase profits while creating precarity in essential services. This is a fundamental problem: asset managers’ motivation to seek short-term returns is inherently at odds with the long-term investment needed to build resilient and lasting infrastructure.

When Theo checks his pension forecast, he discovers he’ll need to work until 68 — three years later than his parents — and even then, he faces a moving target as the average pension pot needed to meet his basic needs in retirement has risen by 60 per cent in the last four years alone. Across the UK, more than half of current workers are not even on track to meet a “moderate” retirement living standard.

When Evelyn’s time finally comes, she leaves £5,000 to cover the costs of her funeral. However, the cost of a funeral has risen 126 per cent in the past 20 years and the average total “cost of dying” has reached £9,797, so Ava and James must pay for the remainder from their savings.

Like many other sectors explored here, the funeral services market has undergone significant consolidation and private equity investment in recent years. As this trend continues, we’re very likely to see the same financial engineering tactics, profiteering and rising costs as in the many other sectors where private equity and institutional investors are now responsible for providing the most basic aspects of every stage of life. As scholar Brett Christophers writes “all of our lives are now part of their investment portfolios.”