By Isle of Wight Observer
Having met various city targets, Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, is due one of the biggest pay days in corporate history. Unquestionably £100 million is an awful lot of money – but his airline is a private company and O’Leary did found it. Budget airlines are notorious for their extra charges, but passengers usually have other choices; Ryanair and easyJet are not monopoly airlines!
Around 6 million of us own pets in the UK; how many live in fear of a trip to the V-E-T? The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is supposedly there to protect us all from rip offs. They’ve decided Britain’s vets need investigation.
Incredibly, we’re handing them over £5 billion a year. One of the CMA’s main concerns is lack of transparency. It’s hard to find basic online information or price lists for veterinary treatments or pet meds. When our darling animals are poorly, we just want immediate attention; we don’t tend to shop around.
Our family rabbit cost us hundreds a year in vet bills, although he eventually died peacefully in the garden. We know someone who was persuaded to spend £3,000 on their elderly cat’s operation. Another took her vet’s advice and spent £1,500 on a little op for her moggy, who sadly died during the procedure. A week later, the bill arrived for the full amount, £1,500 plus a disposal charge – if the body wasn’t collected within 48 hours. I just heard a pet owner on LBC Radio say he’d paid over £900 for a single night’s intensive care for a rabbit. Another claimed his dog’s hygienist visit cost £1,150, although he did require a general anaesthetic. My best friend spent over £25,000 on his dog’s hip operation, that included weeks of mainland therapy pool sessions – and presumably a second mortgage.
The CMA watchdog is also worried about the lack of competition in many parts of the country, and that’s partly because large corporate vets snap up smaller independents. If the CMA decides to act, they could force the big corporate groups to split up their veterinary businesses and reduce the price of the drugs they prescribe.
Personally, I wouldn’t take meds from a vet, because their mark up on pharmaceuticals is outrageous. Many people now buy whatever their vet prescribes on-line at a fraction of the price. Let’s face it, corporate vets are getting away with this because, when our animals are ill, our choice is to cough up or watch them suffer.
The CMA investigation sounds great, but in my own industry – the still unregulated funeral world – we’ve heard it all before. Years ago, after a long investigation, the CMA forced the two biggest UK funeral firms, the Co-op and Dignity, to sell some of their branches to improve competition. So can you guess what they did? They swapped a few branches between them, as in ‘you sell us some of yours; we’ll sell you some of ours.’ Genius; the CMA were satisfied, and the poor old consumer got no benefit whatsoever.
Imagine there’s a CMA enquiry into ferries. After a couple of pointless years pontificating, triumphantly the CMA announce that the remedy is to force Red Funnel to sell its Red Jet service to Wightlink. They further rule that Wightlink must sell its Lymington–Yarmouth route to Red Funnel. Seriously, what effect would that have on fares or reliability?
Last week the equally toothless water regulator fined Thames Water £122 million for its various failures.
The root cause of rip offs in many industries is the way they’re owned. Greedy corporate, sometimes offshore, owners, loading vital organisations with debt while taking too much in dividends and bonuses. Investment generally takes a back seat too. Unless that awful business model is changed, we’re all stuffed.