The Commission's starting point is that we believe that companies should be more than networks of contracts, and at their best they can be living, breathing human institutions held together by trust and a sense of common purpose.

We need to ask whether our corporate structures are either well suited or sufficiently understood to make the most of this wealth creating opportunity.


In seeking to answer these questions, we need to examine the reality of what happens in different corporate forms - what they achieve and what this means for all of us. The company is the most widely used corporate vehicle and will be the attention of our work, but we will also examine how employee owned and customer owned mutuals conduct their business.

We will seek to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of company, employee owned firms and mutual - there will be lessons that we can draw from each. In exploring how employee owned and customer owned firms behave, we are really interested in examining what effect they have on our wider society.  

If there are benefits to the economy and society as a whole in having such businesses around, should we be more assiduous in establishing legislative and regulatory environments that encourage them to flourish?

 

Have your say

Has the banking crisis shown us that we need to take the issues of governance & accountability in corporate structures more seriously?