How Private Equity Sold Out the West | Hettie O’Brien & Vicky Spratt

Why are we living in an age of such profound inequality? Why are our public services crumbling? Why has everything become so expensive?

The conventional answer to all of these questions is that the economy isn’t growing at the rate it used to. But another reason is that a hidden group of dealmakers has infiltrated almost every corner of modern life.

For decades, private equity firms have been buying up everything from housing to hospitals, nurseries and care homes. They have wielded debt as a weapon – and now, they may be corroding the things that are supposed to hold society together.

Hettie O’Brien, lead writer and assistant opinion editor at the Guardian, joins housing journalist and documentary maker Vicky Spratt to discuss the secretive wing of finance that is shaping and distorting our economy.

Speakers

Hettie O’Brien is a journalist interested in money and power. She writes about financiers, fraudsters, short sellers, cities, shopping malls, history, economics and ideas. Her work exposes how complex systems and financial arrangements are transforming our lives by telling stories about the people and places they shape. Her first book, The Asset Class, is a narrative investigation of the private equity industry. It will be published on 9 April 2026 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and 23 June 2026 by Grand Central (US), and was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2024. She’s a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read and has previously worked for the New Statesman as an editor and writer, and as a reporter in Washington D.C.

Vicky Spratt is an award-winning journalist, author, and housing rights advocate. She has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize two years in a row (2023, 2024). Her first book, Tenants, was a Financial Times book of the year in 2022. Vicky’s second book, We Were Promised The Moon, will be published in 2026 with Fourth Estate. It is an agenda-setting analysis of how the economic settlement of the last 30 years has fundamentally reshaped life for young adults today. Vicky is a correspondent and columnist at The i Paper, and her writing is also in demand from other publications such as ELLE and Refinery29. You’ll find Vicky regularly on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Newsnight, Radio 4, the Andrew Marr Show on LBC, and the Newsagents.