Vanguard communities are ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, says snubbed social enterprise

Liverpool’s most well-known social enterprise has been ignored by the government’s vanguard community initiative, launched by the Prime Minister in the city this week.

Blackburne House helps women into training, education and employment and is led by Social Enterprise Coalition chair Clare Dove. However, she said she had not been approached to be involved, give support or invited to the launch, despite the government’s communities department saying they would be using social enterprise to create jobs in film-making.

She said the vanguard communities initiative was like ‘the Emperor’s new clothes’, with no one yet understanding what it is or how it will work.

Liverpool is one of the four vanguard communities, along with Windsor and Maidenhead, Sutton and Cumbria’s Eden Valley, which aim to set the blueprint of devolved power and responsibility to communities as part of the government’s Big Society agenda. Liverpool’s project will start with a volunteering scheme to keep museums open longer.

Although David Cameron has called for social entrepreneurs to be at the heart of the Big Society, it appears that social enterprise is not yet part of the programme.

At Monday’s launch, Cameron said: ‘They [vanguard communities] have got different ideas, from devolving budgets to street-level, to developing local transport services, taking over local assets such as a pub, piloting open-source planning, delivering broadband to local communities, generating their own energy.

‘But they’ve all got one thing in common: a firm commitment from this government to help them realise their dreams.’

Dove said she wasn’t aware the announcement was being made on Monday and was sad and disappointed that her award-winning social enterprise was not involved.

‘It’s like the Emperor’s new clothes. There’s something there, but there’s nothing underneath,’ she said.

‘We need substantial programmes to create housing, education and jobs. It’s a different ball game that needs high-level skills. Vanguard communities is sketchy and we need to know more about what it’s trying to achieve. No one is saying we don’t want communities to do this, but we need to know how it’s going to be implemented and what the role is for social enterprise.

‘If the government wants us to get behind this, then they need to start talking to us.’

Council collaboration

Collaboration with local authorities also appears to be sporadic. In Eden Valley, the most sparsely populated constituency in England, Cumbria County Council has not been involved, although the district council has. Neither knew about the launch until a few days before.

County councillor Peter Thornton, who represents one of the vanguard areas, Kirkby Stephen, said he knew nothing of the initiative, although he did support it.

The community projects planned for the area include a community bus route, a new footpath, broadband and local-level insurance to allow local people to clear snow from pavements without fear of being sued if there’s an accident. Thornton said these were the ideas of three long-standing community campaigners.

‘This has all come very quickly and the county council has not been part of the planning for it. We’ve been pushing for this localism for a long time, but all of a sudden we’re a vanguard community.

‘Kirkby Stephen feels flattered, but most of the community didn’t know it was happening.’

Eden’s district council, however, has played a part and set up ‘Engage Eden’, a working group of local people and representatives from civil society and the private sector. However, council leader Gordon Nicolson was unsure of the role for social enterprise.

‘Eden’s good at this. We’ve already loaned £30,000 to help set up a community land trust and the Big Society Bank will make more money available, but it’s the communities driving it, not us. If we over-design it, it will fail,’ he said.

‘We don’t have social enterprise here in the way they do in the inner city areas and we don’t really recognise the term, but we have a lot of enterprising businesses and community enterprise.’

Richard Kemp, deputy chair of the Local Government Association, said the vanguard communities will engage with social enterprise in time.

‘We still don’t know how vanguard communities will work. They haven’t engaged yet, but they will do. What we need to do now is ensure that all these organisations get involved and find out how they will respond to this opportunity.’

A spokesperson for the communities department, which is providing an official to each of the vanguard communities and has a social enterprise unit, said there was ‘potentially’ a role for social enterprise in the Big Society and that new social enterprises could be started within the vanguard communities.

However, they could not say why social enterprise had not been involved to date or confirm whether it would be promoting the business model to the communities.