Conclusion

Summary

As the new UK procurement law comes into operation, addressing public outsourcing problems remains a difficult and gradual process where, despite their versatility, traditional governance tools in contract design, public markets and regulation all have demonstrable imperfections. Reintroducing public ownership, replacing contractual governance with a public governance regime, is an important alternative intervention, but it bears uncertainties as to whether, in the long term, the state can effectively provide ambitious public welfare without entering into extensive strategic partnerships with private actors. Far from shrinking its responsibilities, the state often uses private actors to achieve, through outsourcing, ambitions that demand additional capacity and capabilities. This is a perfect example of the interdependence of and synergies between market and state in delivering a common good.

Trying to identify alternative governance solutions, this book asks whether innovation is possible by expanding an already existing, but currently rather limited and confined, policy to co-opt corporate governance in sustainably owned firms into the contractual governance of public outsourcing instruments in order to reduce (though not fully avoid) the risk of exploitative and extractive behaviour by private partners. An extended policy, expanding the government's current initiatives to support VCSE organizations, would more fully accommodate the flexibilities available in corporate law to design supplementary governance solutions to common problems in public service outsourcing: it would encourage, even expect, contracting authorities to consider, in their outsourcing decisions, the sustainable corporate ownership design of their suppliers, with the aim of improving outsourcing while nurturing more sustainable corporate market actors.

Corporate organizations in sustainable ownership cover a spectrum of governance options, all of which temper financialization and avoid purely extractive design. These organizations are more diverse than those operating as VCSE organizations in the social economy; they include purposedriven profit-distributing firms, stakeholder-controlled companies, foundation ownership and mutually owned firms. UK company law leaves room for individual companies to reconfigure beneficiary rights, control rights and economic rights in the corporate organization ‘away’ from the investorcentric default model and towards economic, environmental and social sustainability objectives. To what extent corporate organizations make sensible use of this flexibility is a matter of some complexity, but it seems crucially important for government to assume a role through its public procurement in nurturing this experimentation in sustainable corporate ownership designs, enabling new forms to establish themselves and grow, including in the social and wider economy.