Community business

The notion of community business is linked to the notion of community ownership, and more widely co-operative models of ownership.

In his History of Community Asset Ownership,[1] Steve Wyler argues that community ownership represents a strain of English socio-political thoughts and activism that can be traced back to the progressive removal of common land from the Norman Conquest and thereafter, where periodically revolts around access to common resources were quashed by the state, usually with punitive measures against protestors and the districts they had come from. At the same time, the notion of recreating the common access to wealth fed into the concept of the ‘commonwealth’ that animated the thought of Robert Kett, Gerrard Winstanley, the Levellers, the Diggers and the Ranters.

Having failed to prevent the legal privatisation of resources completed by the Inclosure Acts , subsequent efforts turned to developing intentional communities defined by common control or ownership of assets, notably land, such as Owenite models, Feargus O'Connor’s Chartist National Land Company and most successfully, the Co-operative Retail movement and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities.

In the late 1920 in response to the collapse of local industry, British Quakers organised philanthropic aid to the Welsh community of Brynmawr but instead of external relief being applied to the community, that community were empowered to control the businesses created to employ local workers and also control the resulting economic benefits. The Brynmawr Experiment survived until the outbreak of the Second World War, where the community controlled businesses closed due to labour being re-allocated for war production.

The growth of the post-war state meant that many of the challenges for which community activists had created community businesses were being addressed through government action, and with official policies of full employment and welfare and housing provision, a generation avoided the deprivations and insecurities that had driven their forebears. However, the critique of the state from the New Right and New Left found expression in the growth of the Development Trusts in the 1970s and beyond. The progressive benevolence of bureaucratic policymaking was met by a criticism of an over-mighty state which paid no attention to the particularities of communities, and drove a diverse range of protests against roadbuilding and slum clearance.

In Scotland, communities threatening by slum clearance instead organised community-owned and led renovations and protests[2] against absentee landlords spurred activism to acquire highland and Island land to be community-owned.[3] These efforts were boosted by the passage of the 2003 Land Reform Act in Scotland which gave community organisations the right of first refusal on land coming up for sale, and the right to buy upon meeting an independently-assessed purchase price for certain crofting areas.

The development of railway preservation was an early post-war example of community business,[4] blending volunteers with paid staff and trading from passenger income.

The Plunkett Foundation have overseen the development of a range of rural retail outlets, predominantly shops and pubs, owned by their members, with successful trading performance.

In 2014, the UK’s Big Lottery Fund agreed to endow Power to Change, a new charitable trust to support the growth and development of community enterprise.[5] A report commissioned by Power to Change mapped the Community Enterprise Sector in England and described five distinct types of Community Business:[6]

• Public asset managers e.g. community-run libraries, where publicly-run and funded service is made viable using a combination of government contracts, new revenue streams, and volunteer and other goodwill support.
• Business savers, such as community-run pubs or fan-owned teams take an enterprise failing under private ownership and run it successfully under community ownership. These are often local monopoly enterprises.
• Community start-ups, e.g. community energy schemes are social enterprises in the standard model, focussed on a specific place .
• Cross-subsidisers use a traditional business model to support a more charitable service which would struggle to trade its way to sustainable operation on its own revenues.
• Clubs are typically low-cost and low-income e.g. local sports teams; they derive their income from providing a service to their members, and usually have limited goals beyond the meeting of member needs.

Social finance also identified 13 sectors in which community businesses were operating (values estimated by Social Finance in their report)

(Drawn from Steve Wyler's 'History of Community Asset Ownership')

• W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961.
• G E Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution, 1975. Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987.
• Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments 1325 – 1945, 2001.
• Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, 1957.
• Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England,1979
• Dennis Hardy, Community Experiments 1900-1945, 2000.
• George Jacob Holyoake, History of Co-operation, 1875, rev ed 1905.
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1972.
• Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 1987
• Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century, 1983
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, revised ed 1968