Raising the bar

On a beautiful summer’s day in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Martin Booth is riding his bicycle through the orchard in the village of Hudswell.

The village, built along a straight single road, has a population of 350 and two local amenities: the community hall and the George and Dragon pub – and it is to the latter that Booth is heading.

He comes up to the George through the back entrance, having passed through the community allotments and across the patio with its fine views of the Swale Valley – a pint of well-earned Yorkshire Bitter on his mind.

Well earned in more ways than one. Booth is not just a patron of the George, he’s a co-owner and company secretary of Hudswell Community Pub Ltd. The George is constituted as a co-operative industrial and provident society and its owners are the villagers, their friends and relatives, romantic shareholders from all over the world who like the idea of owning a slice of a Yorkshire pub and the community development finance institution, Key Fund Yorkshire.

The previous landlords had bought the pub at the height of the property boom. They worked hard for 15 months and built up a clientele but then became victims of the credit crunch: they had paid too much for the pub, couldn’t keep up the repayments and the bank repossessed it. In August 2008 the George closed its doors.

The Hudswell villagers, including Booth, waited patiently for some new owners to turn up, but as the months passed and the town remained dry, Booth decided to take matters into his own hands.

Luckily in his day job he works for the Hartlepool New Deal for Communities, so growing community enterprises was something he knew about.

In May 2009 he and a few other locals formed the Community Pub Initiative and held a series of meetings to test the appetite for buying shares in the George. Hudswell isn’t a rich village – in the government’s index of deprivation it ranks just above the middle score – and there were plenty of difficulties to overcome.

These included having shareholders with no experience of running a pub, and trying to find investment at a time when pubs were closing all over the country. To compound these problems the bank that owned the George wanted a buyer with cash, not a group that would have to raise £220,000 from 150 members. Many villagers were sceptical that the project could succeed.

Yet despite these difficulties, the village meetings were well attended. The group attracted the help of a number of support agencies, the most important of these being Key Fund Yorkshire.

As the bank’s deadline of 5 February approached the co-operative was still £40,000 short of its £220,000 target. Key Fund Yorkshire had offered the organisation a loan to cover any shortfall but the directors were wary of taking it on. After desperate negotiations, both parties agreed that Key Fund Yorkshire would take £20,000 equity instead and so become the biggest single shareholder.

The backing of a trusted social lender convinced wavering investors
of the viability of the project and the rest of the required finance flowed in.

On 17 February 2010 the pub was theirs. But that was not the end of the story. Until then the challenge had been setting up the co-operative and raising the funds. Booth’s expertise combined with support from organisations that promote co-operatives and community enterprise was critical. Now the skills of other board members came to the fore. With keys in hand it was obvious the pub needed refurbishing. Thankfully, there were builders and plumbers among the shareholders who gave freely of their time and expertise to make sure their investment was a success.

As work got underway on the pub an important change was happening in the village – the sceptics were finally coming round to the idea.

‘A lot of people said to me “I didn’t really believe it could happen, but now I do because I can see it,”’ says Booth. ‘Seeing that it could be done changed people’s mindset. At first, people were dragged along but now, in a sense, the sky’s the limit.’

The reinvigorated George and Dragon, with its 170 owners (grown from the original 150) is not just a pub. The allotments are another new initiative (and where else can you get an allotment for £25 a year that has a pub attached?) and it is also home to a small library, provides free internet access and is soon to host a village shop with bread baked on the premises. Once the shop is up and running Booth has ambitions to tackle social housing through community ownership too.

All this hard work has been recognised with accolades and praise. None other than the foreign secretary, William Hague, the local MP and a shareholder, presided over the official opening on 12 June. Hague said the pub was a ‘tremendous achievement’ and a ‘great vision for the future’. Then in July Hudswell won the Social and Community category at the Yorkshire and Humber Market Town Awards.

Combatting closures

Further north, in the picturesque Cumbrian village of Crosby Ravensworth, and just two weeks after Hague toasted the opening of the George and Dragon, another Conservative politician, civil society minister Nick Hurd, was visiting another pub – the Butchers Arms.

In 2008 the owners, Colin and Sue Wilson, were wanting to retire for health reasons, but they didn’t want to leave the town without a pub and for a year waited patiently for a buyer to turn up. But, in September 2009, with no prospect of a buyer they closed the doors and the community of 200 residents faced the prospect of losing another community asset.

Over the previous 20 years Crosby Ravensworth had seen a succession of ‘creeping closures’. It lost the village shop, The Sun hotel, the post office and almost the much-loved St Lawrence’s Church, affectionately called the ‘Cathedral of Westmorland’ because it was always far too big for such a small community. The fight to save the church galavanised the village, so when the closure of the pub became a possibility there was a group of local activists already in place.

A little less than a year before the Butchers closed its doors the Lyvenette Community Land Trust had been established. This social enterprise, made up of local people, is trying to buy a disused mining site and turn it into affordable housing, not least for the 23 people with local links who want to move into the village and need affordable housing. It was the first community land trust in Cumbria to be constituted, with the idea of benefiting from new laws that meant community land trusts could apply to the Homes and Communities Agency for funding to develop affordable housing schemes.

Lyvennet Community Trust chair David Graham says: ‘The focus of the trust is community housing but we had always intended to move into other areas. Twenty years ago we had a shop and two pubs. The other pub and the shop have gone, and we lost the post office as well. If we didn’t stop the decline the village would become like one of those wild west towns with the tumbleweed blowing through.’

The trust began with what Graham jokingly refers to as the ‘hard work’ of researching and visiting other community-owned pubs, including the first co-operatively owned pub, also in Cumbria, the Old Crown in Hesket Newmarket. The Old Crown is a real success story. It has not only remained open but expanded its premises, grown its clientele and last year it paid its members a three per cent dividend.

Soon, half of the 200 shares needed to buy the pub were pledged to the trust, and the prospect of community ownership became a real possibility. In June, the Wilson’s threw their support behind the scheme and reopened the Butchers for six-months on reduced opening hours.

Assuming the community can sell the rest of the shares the Butchers is going to be used as an opportunity to further develop community resources. A small shop, internet hub, lunch club for older residents and a parcel delivery centre are some of the ideas being discussed.

And just in case Crosby Ravensworth wasn’t involved in enough community ownership schemes, a separate group in the village is working with Newcastle University, among others, to develop a community owned anaerobic digester, which will convert cow dung to energy.

It’s little surprise that Nick Hurd waxed lyrical about the village, saying it was a ‘really impressive example of a community already making Big Society a reality’.

A rural revolution?

So, is this the future of the Big Society and should we be looking to the countryside for ideas? Politicians think so. Community ownership made it into the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour manifestos.

Before the election, Tory politicians signalled that communities could be given the right to try to set up community ownership schemes before shops and pubs in villages were sold on the open market. Where that policy is now is unclear. However, minister for housing and local government Grant Shapps has moved on another Tory plan to allow local people to overrule planning laws as long as they can prove there is community support for their development plans.

In June, at a speech to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Shapps said: ‘Rather than being told what to build and where, residents of villages, towns and cities will be able to develop their own vision for their place.’ He added that the government plans to introduce local housing trusts ‘enabling communities to create new housing for local people’.

So much for the political fans of community ownership. More importantly, rural residents see the benefits too.

David Graham says: ‘In this day and age you’ve got to do more for yourself. It’s hard – there are a phenomenal number of barriers we’ve had to work around – but if you’ve got the patience and commitment you can achieve a lot.’

What’s more he believes we are approaching a time of ‘widespread replication’ when community land
trusts and co-operatively owned pubs and shops will be the norm in villages.

It is a view shared by Peter Couchman, CEO of the Plunkett Foundation, which specialises in helping and encouraging rural community enterprises. Couchman says last year was a ‘watershed’ which saw 38 community shops opened, double the number of any previous year. Of the 242 community shops that have opened in the UK only six have closed.

Couchman also points to the popularity of the community-owned pubs programme the Plunkett Foundation is due to run this year. This scheme’s £3.3m funding from the government has been suspended, awaiting the outcome of the comprehensive spending review, yet in a few months Plunkett has been contacted by 80 interested groups.

At the same time he warns that we are only on the ‘cusp’ – we have not yet secured a rural revolution.

Recipes for success

What would be needed for such a revolution to succeed? First is the belief that communities can create their own solutions. Couchman sees this as a major stumbling block, which is one reason he is so happy about the media spreading the word about community ownership. He credits much of the spike in enquiries to the Plunkett Foundation to the storyline about local villagers starting a community-owned shop in the Radio 4 soap The Archers.

Next come the practicalities. A good starting point for villagers is to get the support of their local council and survey the needs of the community. This tends to prompt people to think about solving more than one issue. For example, if loneliness for older people is an issue why not add a café to a shop?

The village of Ropley in Hampshire is a case in point. Here, a community-owned shop has run for many years and now local resident Martin Evans is looking into community ownership to save the threatened pub – but that’s not all. Supported by the council officer who was involved in the scheme for the shop, Evans is planning a survey to get a proper overview of all the possible problems and solutions in the community and create a parish plan.

Evans says: ‘The principle behind the plan is that it offers the opportunity to look at the overall strategy for the village and where things like community ownership could help.’

Next, comes a creative, tuned-in council. For example, one problem rural communities face is that shop and pub owners sometimes run down their own businesses to prove they are not viable and thus get planning permission for houses. However, in Berrynarbor, North Devon, the council safeguarded against this happening by insisting the shop owner lease the shop to the community for five years. The business was a huge success and after four years moved into new premises, allowing the owner to sell the original shop.

Finally, access to people who can support and help at different points in the system is crucially important, and here is where the greatest danger lies to the future of community ownership.

Peter Couchman is worried that programmes that spread knowledge and information will be seen as an easy target in a time of austerity. Without these there he says there will be a ‘bunch of communities reinventing the wheel and not being as successful as they could be’.

Hudswell, Crosby Ravensworth and Ropley all bear out his point, as they have all benefited from the support of specialist organisations or council officers. Andy Lloyd is the community land trust project officer in Cumbria who helped Cosby Ravensworth. His position as a local point of contact was first thought of by the Lake District National Park Authority, which got several local authorities and housing associations on board too.

It is a step that has paid off, with five communities in the area going ahead with land trust schemes and four more expressing interest. And while Lloyd’s position is now secure thanks to a philanthropic and European grant, as austerity measures bite will other local authorities show the imagination shown in the Lake District?

Lloyd is optimistic. ‘In the past we’ve had an emphasis on things being done for us by institutions,’ he says. ‘But with government support you could eventually get to a point where these sorts of schemes are not thought of as being remarkable any more.’

After a glorious summer it seems we’re heading into a winter made warmer by the firesides of community-owned pubs – a rural revolution done in a particularly British way.

Find out more at:

www.plunkett.co.uk

www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk

http://vimeo.com/channels/communitylandtrusts

www.communityshares.org.uk