The Local Enterprise Partnerships in the East Midlands and South East Midlands are conducting a survey of businesses in our area to find out whether businesses are able to get access to finance to support their growth.
This could of course include social finance for all socially impacting businesses.
They would like to know about business’ experiences if they have sought funding recently or if they plan to seek funding for future investment projects. They would also like to know if they have any barriers to growth.
By completing the survey below, businesses will help the Local Enterprise Partnerships in the East Midlands and South East Midlands to decide how to use their funds to help small and medium-sized enterprises.
Nottingham based Food Freedom, a new social business created by Nicky Gray and supported by Roger Moors of SEEM managed to secure national coverage this week on BBC Radio 4.
Developed as a consultancy and training company to advise and inform food businesses about allergies, Nicky spoke about the impending legislation that all restaurants, indeed all food outlets will be subject to come mid December this year. ‘You and Yours’, one of the stations prime time programmes featured Nicky and a number of restauranteurs talking about the need to comply with the new laws or face prosecution.
Nicky who has a wealth of knowledge in this arena decided to establish her business last year to both safeguard people who suffer with food allergies and intolerances but also to assist food outlets, many of whom are unaware of the new law and their obligations. Food Freedom was one of a number of businesses supported by SEEM under the Cabinet Office Social Incubator North programme. Roger said…
‘I’m delighted that Nicky has managed to get this level of publicity and awareness on national radio. The impact of her work is enormous and I’m really pleased that the support and finance we provided has enabled her to grow and develop her business so successfully in such a short period of time’.
We were pleased to cross the City and to be invited to the latest CleanTech Centre lunch event, on Thursday 21st October, 2014. A great opportunity to network and hear key speakers in an informal, professional setting.
Our Roger Moors was delivering the keynote presentation to the assembled guests and he was welcomed to the event by Bob Pynegar of Inntropy Limited, who owns the Centre.
Inntropy was set up in 2011 by Bob Pynegar and Nick Gostick. They saw that a building in West Nottingham had the potential to be an incubator for entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs specialising in clean technologies. This building is now known as The Nottingham Clean Tech Centre (NCTC).
Bob wrapped his introduction to delegates with an illustration of how the CleanTech Centre offers its resident businesses a professional, supportive atmosphere to work in, with the advantage of having spaces available to meet client s and suppliers, as well as being able to take advantage of the Inntropy ‘entrepreneurship offer’ – mentoring, guidance , support and training.
Completing his delivery to the audience with a stress upon the growing importance of the Social Business sector, whether as a source of development funding, the melding of company philosophies with consumer expectations or the growth of the ‘triple bottom line’ business. ‘Social outcome will be even more important for the SME sector in the future...’ said Bob.
Roger Moors of SEEM then took centre stage. Roger began by offering the assembled business audience a range of definitions about the context of charities in business, social enterprises, and now with the emergence of the social finance sector, the ever growing importance of companies with distinct and clear social aims, yet who can still deliver external dividends as part of their enterprise processes.
Roger used a few simple diagrams to make his point. The ‘blended social business’, with solid social aims, clear business strategies and distinct profits would look something like this, he argued…
Achieving the blended balance…
Roger emphasised the point that there were 90,000 Social Enterprises in the UK, with only some 10% actually delivering a sustainable business model that was not reliant on loans or charitable grants.
An opportunity for the social business, with strong profits, to deliver social outcome in a sustainable way.
This was not seen as a failure of the sector, but an opportunity for mainstream businesses to make bolder declarations of their social concern and delivery and use this effect to capitalise expansion, new products an services, the whole while supporting their communities of interest.
Roger then launched to the audience the new £1 million Nottingham Social Impact fund, which is designed to fit the investment profile outlined in the narrative above.
With loans available from£5,000 to £150,000, Roger saw the initial tranches of support in the £50,000 sector or below, with an ideal period of three years for repayment. The money will be put out at 6.5% interest.
Roger, in conclusion, stressed the importance of thePublic Sector Social Value Actof January 2013. Committing all Local Authorities to take social impact into account when making strategic procurement decisions with their public money.
Roger receive applause from the audience and the thanks of Bob Pinegar for his clarity and conciseness.
I f you are interested as a start-up in the office provision and business support that the CleanTech Centre can offer, then please use the contact details below.
The Pop-up Shop has been getting a lot of press recently.
Did it ever go away? Is a revision to enterprise philosophy under way? Asset management, both in the public and private sector is in flux. With revisionist thinking on collaboration and about public space utility and development?
We think there is this paradigm shift, which can energise the social finance market. It will temper developments in the public space. This affects political mission, private capital movements and community outcome.
We offer as evidence the three reports/ideas formulated by a diversity of organisations below. As crisp in their thinking as they are diverse. They are telling onlookers to change, at an opportune moment for our sector.
The Pop-Up Shop:
Hogarth imagines the pop-up shop?
Reading mainstream articles about this newly energised movement, we enjoyed revisiting the web site of www.appearhere.co.uk . We see it as a metaphor for a new retailing in the UK.
We are a world away from the ’empty space’ temporary retail proposition of old.
Gone are bare spaces, filled with less than high quality merchandise on a seasonal pressure sale basis. In comes a range of artisan producers, innovatory publishers and craft manufacturers. All intent on capitalising on short term, premium retail spaces. It should stir the imagination?
The Appear Here concept achieves a number of aims for the burgeoning retailer. Firstly, you can use the site to scope spaces across the UK, and will be able to view more in the future. You can also see, upfront, the cost of occupying the space over your chosen period.
If you are a community enterprise just at the planning stage this is important. Not being retail property specialists, but with a passion for your community manufactury, then knowing what the costs are likely to be, with support of the Appear Here team, could be a deal clincher for your project.
We haven’t fully explored the booking conditions from the site yet, and cannot see other start-up costs like majority deposits that may be needed, but overall the presentation makes a telling offer for the 21st Century. Check out Appear Here today.
We also liked and applaud The Plunkett Fondation’s attempts to vivify the community shop. They have recently published a new report Community Shops 2014 – A Better Form of Business.
Better shops, better communities…
The Foundation’s main focus is on rural development. As with the initiative above, retailing and the opportunities it offers, are good in inner-city areas too.
These include the principles of stock management, employment, volunteering, managing cash-flow and more.
The mixture of skills and commitment adds human capital, not only to the shop, but also the community if done right.
What can be gleaned for the Plunkett report is how a local shop can be a driver for community cohesion, a broad, beneficial identity and, because it is community owned, a wider sense of community ownership of place is also generated. Who cannot be proud of the area the shop they own exists within?
Socially Productive Places:
Yesterday The Royal Society for the Arts (RSA), in collaboration with British Land, published a new report about an emergent model to add value to public spaces by utilising a new admixture of co-operation and skills shared amongst local authority planners, developers, community groups and politicians.
New ideas in regeneration…
We were excited by the report, which contains recommendations for how private developers and public sector players can innovate and collaborate in new ways to get the maximum value from public spaces, whilst at the same time adding value to built assets.
At the heart of the report is a lack of fear about profitability. But with a sense of urgency and innovation about how the public domain renovates and rebuilds from now on.
The report tells us what should not done. As well as illustrating the new skills needed by key players in the development sector. It is a cogent and telling argument.
It’s a timely report and you can read a short review, and find links to the conference that inspired the research, on conversationsEAST, the East of England Fellowship journal supporting the work of the RSA.
Mass Collaboration:
The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), is a centre-left think tank. It recently published a paper called Mass Collaboration.
Within the context of this brief article, the IPPR piece binds together some of the ideas expressed above. Taking a meta-narrative view of policy and practice.
To see how to achieve change in the public arena. Moving to mass engagement within the socio-political structures that frame our society.
Working together in a new way…
The paper, authored by Matthew Pike, a serial social entrepreneur. He has connections to Unltd, Big Society Capital and the Social Investment Business.
Matthew is the founder of www.resultsmark.org, a free reporting system for public services. Always worth checking out!
The Pike thesis for change, that will will channel mass collaboration, is based upon five key principles. We give them below.
“Invest in shared institutions that build social capital and engender supportive working relationships across sectors and hierarchies, such as teams of supporters around individuals, community anchor organisations, children’s centres, extended schools and more. Above all, invest in new ‘backbone organisations’ that can mobilise and organise whole-system change across localities.
Understand what help people need in order to help themselves and discover the existing strengths within people and communities, through an immersive programme of listening and learning.
Harness the new power of ‘big social data’ to turn public funding into a real-time process of action learning, understanding as much as possible about activities, outcomes and costs in an area to help design new systems that give people the help they need in a much smarter way.
Provide funding, investment and support to test, grow and scale up what works better in a local context and cut what isn’t needed or is less effective.
Work progressively to use new insight and evidence to help redesign the wider systems, rules and regulations that hamper local achievement”.
The five could apply to the social finance sector, and the players operating in it. Innovation, change, consultation, system and process review, engagement with communities of interest. All are all defining characteristics of the Social Finance sector.
The thematic glue to them, for us in the sector, is money. It’s accrual, its management and its dispensation. The Pikeian motif can layer upon the RSA paper, as well as across the innovatory approach of The Plunkett Foundation. In essence, we should talk to each other and ‘do things different’.
A heady time to be in the vanguard of a new movement?
Ethical business with a social dimension…
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To the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham this morning, 17th July 2014, for a massive double espresso shot of Social Finance. Two hours of concise advice, proven experience and excitement for a sector under change.
Hosted by our own Roger Moors of SEEM, the assembled audience convened for coffee and muffins at 7.45am, more about the venue at the bottom of this article, all looking forward to a series of key speakers on expanding, developing and capitalising on our growing sector, courtesy of Big Society Capital.
Councillor Nick McDonald – Nottingham City Council:
Cllr. McDonald was delighted to announce to the gathered social finance bankers and intermediaries that the City now had a newNottingham Social Impact Fund. This new source of funding for the enterprising small business comprises a pot of £1 million pounds, which, argued Cllr. McDonald, coupled to a revised City Procurement Policy, would heavily lean the city towards a paradigm shift in its industrial base, as well as building on existing entrepreneurial energies in the city. A new fund is always welcome for the business sector, particularly at very good rates.
Geetha Rabindrakumar – Social Sector Lead, Big Society Capital:
New research, new ideas…
Geetha began by offering the audience a classic definition of social investment, and underscored research that indicates, whilst societal problems will magnify and public sector funding will continue to diminish, it is the social sector, with its thirst for new forms of finance that will drive the sector forward in the next few years.
Underscoring the role of Big Society Capital as a finance wholesaler, Geetha stressed the importance of intermediaries in process, and that BSC will be looking to exhaust its coffers on innovative projects, which give investors their money back, provide a return on that investment and achieve social impact and delivery.
A clear presentation of roles and responsibilities in the sector, now and in the future.
Sam delivered a pacy and detailed analysis of the work of The Key Fund for his audience. Outlining the Fund’s history, but also encouraging intermediaries with the news of the quality of relationships the Fund enjoys, it’s flexibility and pace in moving from application to decision. A refreshing approach in a finance oriented sector, we believe.
The Fund also illustrated how innovative and enterprising communities and individuals can be. Sam offered the audience examples of Fund development clients as diverse as a Therapeutic Comedy Training Academy, a Virtual Human Body for drug testing, community wind farms and and solar photo-voltaic energy installations on community buildings.
The Key Fund deserves it’s key player status as a driver of fiscal energy for projects across the North of England. Discover The Key Fund on–line here.
Peter Ware – Partner at Browne Jacobson LLP:
Peter gave the assembled audience a very informative over-view of Public Sector Mutual’s development. Organisations that move into the social business sector, ofen with existing customer bases and public sector ethics and philosophy.
Reminding us that the sector could see demand for social finance rise to £500 million by 2015, Peter, nonetheless, did not shy away from some of the issues to be wrangled with in creating Mutuals in a local authority setting.
Matt explained the heavyweight nature of The Big Lottery, and how it was looking to develop agile, relevant and timely funding solutions in the future, particularly to benefit the social finance sector.
Working across three strategic layers the Fund is looking at how demand, intermediaries and the supply side of funding can all be tempered and flexed to respond to the needs of risk capital with a social mission at its centre.
Richard gave us a ‘rally cry’ speech, moving across his own initiation into social business, after being a banker for twenty years and finding himself re-tailoring a hotel group in an area of social need.
Raising £3 million pounds, only a year ago, using the social business’s innovative model of housing development, coupled to partnerships in the social enterprise sector to provide training and skills support for ex-offenders.
So successful has Richard’s ministration been that profits are reported, funding need has been reined back, temporarily, and the business is set fair to exceed it’s targets of 15 property renovations undertaken per annum and with 150 clients supported through their training process into employment by the end of this five year bond period.
Midlands Together, using a revision of the ‘Together’ model developed in Bristol, describes its work as property development with a heart. Real asset development, care for people and delivery of profits. We were inspired.
We had our breakfast convocation at the Galleries of Justice in the Lace Market quarter of Nottingham. In the heart of the city’s creative area, this museum, educational service and charity offers a fascinating series of spaces for events.
We met in the courtroom. You can see from the narrative above, all our star witnesses for the defense of Social Finance were sparkling. The verdict? Guilty of enthusiasm and expectation for the future.
Evolve 2014, an annual event for the voluntary sector is almost upon us again.
The gathering, organised by the NCVO, features a sector Summit, Marketplace and and a variety of Fringe events to occupy and interest everyone across the third sector.
No matter what your role is with, or within, the voluntary sector, there is something at Evolve 2014 that is relevant to you and your organisation. It will help you look to the future, whatever the size, shape and mission of your organisation.
Date: Monday 16 June
Time: 09.30 – 17.30
Location: The Brewery and Montcalm Hotel, London
The keynote morning events are delivered by Hilary Benn, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, as well as a session by Dawn Austwick, Chief Executive of The Big Lottery Fund. See the Summit agenda in detail here.
One of the key Fringe events will be delivered by Neil Berry, Head of Trading, Locality. The session reflects that…
incredibly, the economy of scale argument is still dominant in the Treasury, in government departments, in local councils and health bodies, and across the political spectrum. This is the myth that cutting costs will be achieved by combining public sector procurement into larger and larger contracts, by driving down unit costs through efficiencies of scale.
Local by default?
Locality will be presenting their ideas as to how this dis-economy of scale can be subverted by a new methodology of delivery for the Public Sector. The recommendations are based upon original research by Professor John Seddon and the team at Vanguard Consulting.
We recently featured the Ignite Social Enterprise initiative, the Big Energy Idea, which will put over £10 million pounds into the ‘social energy’ sector in the next ten years.
Below is a short film of the recent Ignite ceremony, where ten passionate and technically informed social businesses won funding and support as the first tranche of winners in the Big Energy Idea.
At the inaugural event held at Centrica’s head offices on 29 and 30 April 2014, the successful Big Energy Ideas were selected. The 10 entrepreneurs will now work with an expert team from the energy sector to raise investment in their ventures in order to grow their companies and scale the social impact of their work.
You can discover more about the winners, and their enterprising ‘social energy’ ideas below…
Brackenburn Ltd is an ethical business established to produce biomass fuels derived from local sustainable resources, primarily bracken,
and to market to domestic customers and public sector, agricultural and commercial users within the region. Read more here…
Energy Box: Based in Soho, Energy Box will deliver a £100 per year cost of energy reduction per household in fuel poverty while employing people from the same communities to manage and maintain the system.
Co-Wheels: Based in North East, UK wide, Co-Wheels is the first registered social enterprise that focuses on making personal mobility accessible for lower income communities while reducing car use. Read more here…
Energise London: In four of London’s 33 boroughs, Energise London operate free energy savings advice helplines and train employees to recognise and address fuel poverty. Read more here…
Energy Solutions Malvern: Based in West Midlands, Energy Solutions Malvern provide renewable energy installations to customers who enjoy return on investments and environmental benefits from a reduction in their carbon footprint. Read more here…
Gower Power: Based in Wales, Gower Power will build solar farms, providing green electricity for households and a local school. Using the
Feed In Tariff income they will grow affordable, local produced food on the farm owned as part of the Co-op structure. Read more here…
GrowUp Urban Farms: Based in London, GrowUp Urban Farms will create urban farms that use sustainable technology to grow food for local communities that lack open spaces in a way that is energy efficient. Read more here…
Health Squared: Based in North Yorkshire, Health Squared sell wood briquettes as a commercial venture for public good. Working with local health partners, their public
good is providing renewable energy to all customers and free briquettes to targeted older peopel to keep them warm. Read more here…
Rekindling: Based in London, Rekindling will support the rehabilitation of offenders by making what would otherwise have been waste wood into bags of firewood and kindling which will be sold commercially.
Sust-It: Based in the South West, Sust-It is a customer focused energy use comparison and
advice website that assists low income individuals and improve energy literacy. Read more here…
It is great to see the vibrancy and enterprise in this newly emergent sector. The project winners are innovative organisations with a social mission, whose work provides change and efficiency both up and down the supply chain.
We wish them well and look forward to the next cohort of Big Energy Idea winners.
Winner narratives for this article courtesy of Ignite
Ethical business with a social dimension…
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There is a new movement afoot in the world of business, namely social finance, and a new concurrency in the ethical, diverse and empathetic way that organisations with an appropriate mission are related to, funded and supported. Both from the world view of the consumer, but also the wholesale and retail social finance sector.
There is also a stirring of new thought and sensibility in the world of economics. How it is taught, how it is understood in terms of social impact and how diversity of viewpoint, model and perception should be just as important as rigid neo-classical dogma.
A challenge to the accepted order….
In the North West of England this new thought is well expressed by the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES). Their paper Economics, Education and Unlearning is at once a polemic against the orthodoxy of their present academic tutorial staff and system, but is also a proxy for how a new generation of economics graduates will come to see this diversity and system choice in framing new concepts for the future.
Much of the PCES paper is a critique of the detailed processes of tutorials and curriculum delivery at the University. However, there is also much to be gained from a reading by those interested in economic thought in the wider context.
The students argue that the sole focus on the neo-classical mode of economic thought leaves all alternative theories and approaches in the void. The students argue in their paper that to be equipped as economists in a world of variety, choice and new model start-ups, then they should be able to abandon the…
elevated economic paradigm, often called neoclassical economics, as the sole object of study. Other schools of thought such as institutional, evolutionary, Austrian, post-Keynesian, Marxist, feminist and ecological economics are almost completely absent…
In the real world it is these shades or degrees of economic thought which so often temper the real aspirations of economic players, at the local, regional, national and now often, international level.
Interestingly, the forward to the paper is delivered by Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England. In it he describes how the Adam Smith concept of the ‘invisible hand’ in Smith’s 1776 book The Wealth of Nations gave us the prime mover of neo-classical economics.That the ‘…pursuit of self interest, at the level of the household or firm, resulted in aggregate outcomes which could be optimal for society as a whole’. The thesis that greed is good, that competition triumphs all.
Haldane’s argument is that for the 21st Century, for a social finance environment, built on an ethical and socially responsible framework, it is Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759 that should now become our principal text, ‘…it places centre stage concepts such as reciprocity and fairness, values rather than value’.
Whatever your originating position on economics, from neo-con to Marxist- feminist and all hues in between, we hope you can be persuaded that the students of Manchester, and other centres of learning, have marshalled a compelling set of arguments to amend and redirect the teaching of economics in the U.K. It bodes well, we would argue, to have a new generation of economic thinkers unafraid to mould theory and practice into a many headed fiscal hydra, in order to eat into the economic disenfranchisement and unfair distribution of so much of the world’s population.
We were uplifted.
Ethical business with a social dimension…
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Published a week or so ago now, the Office of Fair Trading update on their market review of banks and their attitudes and approaches to the SME sector makes for interesting reading.
The report notes that the mainstream banking sector has made some positive movements and improvements to their SME approaches, following the 2002 Competition Commission’s investigation into banking practice.
However, there is much to be concerned about from an SME perspective ‘...the OFT has received concerns about failure to comply with…undertakings, which prevent banks from requiring an SME to take out a Business Current Account (BCA) in order to obtain a business loan (that is ‘bundling’ of BCAs with business loans). The OFT considers that compliance with these undertakings is important as they are designed to help providers to compete effectively in SME banking’.
Even in 2014 the report finds that…
The provision of business current accounts (BCAs) and business loans remains concentrated among a small number of major banks.
Barriers to entry and expansion may be contributing to newer or smaller providers finding it difficult to enter and expand their business across the core business banking products.
SMEs find it hard to differentiate between providers. There are low levels of shopping around and switching, and low awareness of alternative sources of finance.
More troubling is the aspect of the report which cites new, alternative lenders as being hampered in delivering services to SME’s because, allegedly, the mainstream banks are moving at a snails pace when authorising transfers or in waiving security on current loan arrangements for additional alternative lender charges to be rendered.
Two things occur. The notion of ‘level playing field’ is rendered useless in competition terms, and that the openness and clarity of most of the Social Finance sector, given their strong ethical and community focus, shines like a beacon across the current banking landscape.
Linda Slack – 
0115 822 1865
