A POLITE GUERRILLA army is on the march. From Glasgow to Great Torrington, from Dartford to Darlington, citizens are arming themselves with pencils and tomes of planning law and campaigning to preserve their streets and their open spaces. Which in many cases means keeping out Tesco. Sorry, Tesco. Every little hurts.
I mention this not just because I too am beginning to feel oppressed by the Tescopoly (though I am fully aware of the arguments for consumer choice), but because some of these campaigns suggest a new way of thinking about how to value land that has been held in trust for the public, but which is now worth so much to developers that councillors start burbling about job creation at the merest hint of a cheque.
Nowhere demonstrates what is happening better than the battle of Hodge Hill in Birmingham. Less than a mile from where the council gave permission for another superstore only last week, and just over two miles from an existing Tesco, the company is trying to build another 65,000 sq ft of supermarket and 450 parking spaces on Brockhurst Road playing fields. Hodge Hill is not some trendy middle-class enclave that prefers to source its ciabatta from a farmer’s market. It is one of the most deprived wards in the country. That makes its playing fields an even more vital local resource. England has lost nearly 34,000 pitches to development in the past 13 years.
The Napoleons of Hodge Hill are not just nimbys fighting to preserve the status quo. They have a vision for the land. If they could own and manage it, they would revitalise it. Restore the disused tennis courts and bowling green. Build a health centre on the site of a crumbling warehouse. They seek, in short, to make much more of this community asset than the council has.
Is this possible? Absolutely, if they can leverage the value of the land to help to finance their plans to do good. That is what is called “social enterprise” — the new buzzword doing the rounds of both the Labour and Tory parties which will be repeated ad infinitum at the party conferences over the next two weeks.
One of the most visible social enterprises is on the South Bank in London. There, a group of residents calling themselves the Coin Street Community Builders (CSCB) succeeded in buying 13 acres of car parks, derelict land and bomb sites in 1984 from the GLC. It was a daring deal, galvanised by plans to create a Berlin Wall of office blocks along the river. The campaigners had a bold vision: to create a mixture of shops, parks and affordable homes on the site between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges. And they were tenacious. The group approached 30 banks for a loan to refurbish the disused Oxo Tower, before finally finding one that would accept the land as collateral.
Twenty years later you can walk down the riverside between the London Eye and the Tate Modern, eat your sandwich in the gardens, pop into the shops and cafés at the Oxo Tower and Gabriel’s Wharf, and admire the award-winning architecture of new flats and houses. CSCB is essentially a business that uses its profits to cross-subsidise activities — parks, small business start-ups, social housing — that would not otherwise be viable.
To some, this is an outrageous notion. I remember standing in 1995 in the derelict Oxo building with an urban planner who was disgusted at the cheek of a bunch of local people proposing to turn this prime riverside space into flats for the poor. When I told him that their rents would be subsidised by a Harvey Nichols restaurant on the top floor, he went puce under his hard hat. “Absurd,” he said. “Posh nosh and social housing will never mix.” But they have.
I worked with CSCB in the mid and late-1990s, when I was heading a joint venture between them and local private firms and arts bodies. The people behind CSCB may have started out as hippies but they have become shrewd entrepreneurs. Its two finance men are clever enough to be structuring derivatives for Goldman Sachs, but housing needy families is to them a greater reward. Iain Tuckett, Coin Street’s inspired director, realised early on that he needed what he calls a Robin Hood approach.
Any sustainable strategy, he says, has got to have something that brings in money and recycles it.
A growing number of charities are now running on similar lines, fed up with being dependent on government grants. Ealing Community Transport, which started out as a tiny community-run bus service, is now also the largest non-profit waste and recycling company in Britain, with a £45 million turnover and 1,000 employees. It has grown by acquisition, just like any capitalist enterprise.
Government is excited about these experiments. But it still seems to understand the “social” part better than the “enterprise” bit. Many social enterprises still face enormous obstacles to creating endowments or borrowing against the asset they own. Many local authorities and government agencies insist on creaming off any “surplus” revenue that is made by community groups over and above the running costs of the building or land they own. This is a complete disincentive for those groups to expand or invest in other areas. If they can’t borrow, they can’t get the next scheme off the ground. And the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is still advising councils to bundle their contracts together to get better value. That denies opportunities to social entrepreneurs whom the Treasury would like to run some public services.
Social enterprises are risky. But so are more conventional charities into which the Government pumps enormous amounts of cash, much of which is wasted. We need more entrepreneurs who believe that there is such a thing as society. So let’s level the playing field — except not literally at Hodge Hill. If Tesco wins there, we will have lost an important chance to show that there is another way.
