Why Social Enterprises Are Essential Infrastructure — Not Optional Extras — in the Delivery of Public Services.
By Upturn Enterprise · September 2024
Social enterprises have held up our crumbling public services for years — reinvesting profits, joining up services and needs, and piloting innovation that statutory organisations cannot risk. The question is no longer whether social enterprises can deliver public services effectively. The evidence is overwhelming that they can. The question is whether public institutions, commissioners and funders have the ambition to give them the central role they deserve.
The Track Record
Across health and social care, housing, education, employment support and community regeneration, social enterprises are delivering outcomes that match or exceed those of conventional providers — often at lower cost and with significantly greater community legitimacy. They do so because they are embedded in the communities they serve, because they have genuine accountability to those communities, and because their mission — not their profit margin — drives every decision they make.
At Upturn, this is not an abstract argument. We have spent two decades demonstrating, in one of England’s most deprived towns, what a social enterprise with deep community roots and relentless focus on outcomes can achieve. The 15,000 individuals we have supported, the 2,000 businesses we have helped to start or grow, and the £5 million we have invested in community outreach are not theoretical — they are the lived reality of what happens when social enterprise is given the space and the resource to do what it does best.
What Needs to Change
For social enterprises to play their full role in the delivery of public services, several things need to change. Commissioning processes need to recognise the value of community embeddedness, social impact and long-term relationship investment alongside narrow cost considerations. Payment models need to reflect the full value of sustained outcomes, not just rapid job entries or programme completions. And public institutions need to build genuine partnerships with social enterprises — not treat them as low-cost subcontractors.
We are committed to engaging in these conversations — with commissioners, policy makers and fellow social enterprises — because we believe that the future of public services in communities like ours depends on getting them right.
