In Sweden, the opposite is true: large-scale outsourcing of care services began in the 1990s, but nobody would dare touch the state's fire engines or ambulances.
At the event, Protecting Communities, Fighting Crime Together, Miliband said that although public-private partnerships were "an important part of modern policing", large-scale outsourcing and the privatisation of police forces had to be stopped.
Or will the country see large-scale outsourcing in the coming years?
"It was the first large-scale outsourcing that we've done," says Dispatch Associate Publisher and Chief Operating Officer Mike Curtin.
The two firms are the major private players in criminal justice privatisation and it is hard to see how any further large-scale outsourcing police, probation or prison project can succeed without some sort of involvement by them.
While many of its rivals have adopted 21st-century methods of production, including large-scale outsourcing, Hermès has cultivated an image as a company apart, an identity that makes it extraordinarily attractive as an acquisition.
In comparing findings for a medium-sized organization with those from two large-scale outsourcing contracts, the study notes the different challenges arising in organizations of different size and at different stages in their sourcing strategies.
The cases, studied longitudinally, involved a medium-sized organization beginning to outsource, and a multinational and a national bank with international interests, both of which were several years into large-scale outsourcing arrangements.
Chasing these targets in the face of austerity in the UK and the federal shutdown in the US meant expanding into new areas, such as clinical healthcare and large-scale private outsourcing, which Serco had avoided in the past.
Additional information about data and results is captured in Additional file 1. Base on the above findings, this research concludes that just like large scale organizations, small and medium scale enterprises outsource.
