VOICE10: Monsters vs Aliens represents investment bankers vs social entrepreneurs

The government-owned banks Lloyds and RBS should be pressured to invest in social enterprises, said Social Enterprise Coalition board member and investment expert Caroline Mason today.

Speaking in a finance-focused session at the Social Enterprise Coalition annual conference Voice10, Investing for Good director Mason said: 'From a policy perspective we need to make our voices heard.

'The government owns two of the largest banks in the UK and is insuring the rest - they need to be challenged to work with us.'

In what was described as one of the most memorable analogies of the conference, Mason also argued that the relationship between the social enterprise sector and mainstream finance was a 'Mexican stand-off' much like the movie Monsters vs Aliens.

'To the social sector, investment bankers are awful, evil greedy monsters rampaging through the world, causing crushing havoc and destruction as they go,' she said.

'To the finance sector, the social enterprise world is inhabited by aliens, speaking a completely unintelligible language, with utterly unrecognisable and strange ways of doing things, and frankly the complete inability to know one end of a spreadsheet from another.'

Mason said the way to break this 'terrible impasse' was to create social enterprises that were financial intermediaries. And these intermediaries needed to be created now so that the social investment space could be defined by social enterprises.

Director of think tank ResPublica Phillip Blond argued that government should give tax incentives for investing in social enterprises and that the proposed social investment wholesale bank was a better model than government funds like Futurebuilders which starved the rest of the market.

Cooperatives UK secretary general Ed Mayo emphasised the importance of community investment.

He said: 'I want to offer a challenge. I think it's wrong that social enterprise started by saying it wasn't the voluntary sector and not dependent on grants and now it is looking for big investors. It is replacing one paternal figure for another.

'We have to look to self help and mutual aid.'

Mayo added that because of the recession assets like pubs were becoming affordable for communities to invest in.

Welsh Water managing director Nigel Annett said that his company had been able to raise billions from the mainstream markets and their status as a social enterprise had been seen as an advantage in the utility market.

He also said: 'Social enterprise is not limited by size, Welsh Water is a very, very large enterprise.'

• In other news Ed Mayo said that Cooperatives UK and Supporters Direct would be campaigning government to give supporters the opportunity to run their football club as a mutual if 75 per cent of season ticket holders agreed. The first Co-operatives Fortnight in the UK would be held from 19 June to 3 July.