There is a particular kind of paperwork that only gets written when someone is worried about losing something valuable. This week it emerged in the form of an EU ownership trust, a rollover share scheme capped at 49.9 per cent, and a founding family's decision to keep a modest stake rather than cash out entirely. EasyJet's board has agreed to a takeover by the American private equity firm Apollo Global Management, valuing the airline at roughly £5.7 billion, after a three-month contest in which rival bidder Castlelake ultimately withdrew. The structure exists for one reason: to keep the airline majority-owned and controlled by parties who satisfy EU and UK aviation rules, without which easyJet would lose the flying licences that let it operate across the continent it depends on.

It is worth sitting with how much care went into that structure, because the same care is almost entirely absent from the sale of comparably essential services closer to home.

Apollo is not being coy about its intentions. It wants to accelerate easyJet's existing strategy rather than rewrite it, and has pointed to loyalty schemes, ancillary revenue and the airline's holidays business as the areas it finds most attractive. Jobs and pensions have been promised protection, the founder's family will remain shareholders, and the whole arrangement will proceed through a court-approved scheme of arrangement, with regulators and shareholders still to sign off before anything completes. None of this guarantees the deal turns out well for staff or passengers. But it guarantees that somebody was required to think, in detail, about who would own a strategically important service and under what constraints, before money changed hands.

NHS dentistry offers the uncomfortable contrast. A small number of private equity-backed chains now hold a substantial share of NHS dental contracts, built through years of acquisition with far less scrutiny than a listed airline receives from the Takeover Panel. There was no equivalent moment of public reckoning when consolidation reached the point where patients in whole towns struggled to find an NHS dentist at all, only a slow accumulation of closures and contract handbacks that policymakers are still trying to explain years later. Social care tells a similar story with sharper edges. The financial distress at large care home operators, most visibly Four Seasons and later HC-One, showed what happens when leveraged ownership structures collide with a sector that cannot simply absorb a bad refinancing. Residents do not have the option of waiting for a scheme of arrangement to complete.

General practice is now edging toward the same pattern, as corporate consolidators buy up partnerships in a sector never designed to be owned this way, and where the regulatory apparatus watching it is thinner than anything a listed transport company would face.

The point is not that private capital has no place in health and care. It plainly does, and has done for decades, in everything from care homes to diagnostics to the buildings the NHS occupies. The point is that the state has never developed the reflexes an industry regulator applies almost automatically: asking who actually controls an essential service once the deal closes, what obligations survive a change of hands, and what happens if the new owner's appetite for the sector cools. Aviation has a Takeover Panel, an EU ownership test and years of precedent forcing exactly these questions into the open before a transaction proceeds. Dentistry, social care and increasingly general practice have contract terms, a patchwork of regulators, and considerably more faith that things will work out.

Apollo's structure for easyJet may or may not deliver what it promises. But its existence tells you something the NHS's own experience with private capital rarely admits: that scrutiny at the point of ownership change is not bureaucratic friction, it is the mechanism by which an essential service stays accountable to something other than its buyer's exit timeline. Aviation learned that lesson through regulation built for a different crisis, decades ago. Health and care are still finding out the hard way, one contract handback at a time.