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The 10 Year Plan feels like it's taken a lot of lessons from social enterprise models. We've even been mentioned! But the Plan still seems blind to the significant contribution social enterprises make in delivering services, writes Social Enterprise UK Associate Director, Dan Gregory. Today (3 July) saw the much-heralded launch of the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England. It tells us three important things about the thinking in Wes Streeting’s department. First, this is a 10-year plan. Yet this Government has been elected for a 5-year term. So, this is ambitious, it’s aspirational. And perhaps a little detached from reality. Second, they see the launch of a document as significant. From all the recent invitations Social Enterprise UK has received from the Department of Health and Social Care  (DHSC), they are very keen that we read the output of what they’ve been doing for nearly a year. Even if they remain less keen to listen to what we have to say. Third, this is the Plan that will lead to delivery. To change. To the future of the NHS. What's in the Plan? But how? What is in the Plan? What does it say? The plan is long (166 pages) as we might expect. But is remarkably short on how. It helps to have ambitions and direction before you set off, of course. But this isn’t really a complete plan. More of a direction. Perhaps this is wise, and Streeting understands that dictating everything from the top down or centre out is not the answer. The department is directing whilst not directing – the Plan is “tight on what, loose on how”. It’s less of a plan and more a series of bets, trials, pilots and avenues to explore. Change will be slow. New Foundation Trusts (FTs) and Neighbourhood Health Centres will be gradually rolled out through programmes. Various other whizzes – a Choice Charter and Patient Power Payments - will be trialled and “rolled out progressively". On the money side, "in the next 3 years we will make a start on the journey to establishing a new financial foundation." New tariff models will be slowly phased in. New "year of care" payments will be trialled in pioneering areas. Later this year they will "publish a 10 Year Workforce Plan". Of course, this may be quite sensible. But it’s clear that much of the plan is still to be designed and delivered. The new operating model will be "devolved and diverse". This means more messiness in the medium term for sure. But what’s the direction then? Well, the ambition is great. And it’s very much aligned with the ethos and experience of our social enterprise members working in health and care. The ambitions are around prevention and community. Empowered staff, with agile and autonomous models embedded in the local community. Financial incentives to break even and reinvest. Some of this is even quite explicit: "more money towards areas with disproportionate economic and health challenges". Great. No more bailing out FTs in deficit. Good. Hospitals will be expected to “do more as anchor institutions to support wider societal and economic goals. Through their procurement, supply chains and role as an employer, they have significant influence over social and economic development in their communities.” Also good. FTs will have more freedoms to retain surpluses, reinvest them and borrow for capital investment”. Indeed, they will be more like social enterprises. Then of course, there is a lot on the NHS app, on AI and other innovations which I won’t attempt to summarise here, even if I understood them. But some of the detail is rather more troubling. The big new idea is the Neighbourhood Health Centres which will “co-locate NHS, local authority and voluntary sector services, to help create an offer that meets population need holistically” a good idea, for sure. But who is going to tell local charities and social enterprises they are going to have to relocate - is that what this means!? Meanwhile, the financing of new Neighbourhood Health Centres looks a lot like a new wave of private finance initiatives. Then the Plan also seems to effectively nationalise Healthwatch, which was a social enterprise experiment that will now be forgotten and airbrushed away. What about social enterprises? What does it say about social enterprise? There are (phew!) a few mentions. So, we have the recognition we wanted as a baseline – the flag in the sand. Indeed, there are also two case studies - Primary Care Sheffield and Live Well Manchester, which are built around social enterprise. But unhelpfully, the Plan refers to social enterprise at one point as "outside the NHS", which is infuriating. Perhaps, this is partly our fault for reinforcing this idea? I am often annoying our members by asking them to say, “We span out of the public sector” rather than “out of the NHS”. We are part of the NHS! This is indicative of the wider problem here. Large parts of the Plan don’t recognise at all that significant chunks of NHS services are not delivered by the public sector. Where it says - "every NHS provider should be an FT" - it clearly means every public sector provider, not every social enterprise, hospice or GP practice. This blind spot is maddening and doesn't seem to want to go away. Social enterprises deliver several billion of pounds’ worth of NHS services but still we are forgotten and fall between the cracks when it comes to the backlog bonus, access to digital and capital investment, CPD resources, international nurse recruitment, and the list goes on. At Social Enterprise UK, we keep fighting to be included and not forgotten and pull all the advocacy levers we can lean on. Sometimes we win! Some parts of DHSC and NHSE listen. But others don’t. We are currently working with some very engaged NHSE officials on equal access to digital investment, which will be even more critical as these pots of money grow. We are talking to NHSE about how their new structures within DHSC might replicate the old Social Enterprise Unit. But the next day we meet a senior strategist who doesn’t even know that in West Yorks, Plymouth, Bristol, Nottingham. Grimsby, Medway and beyond, we are the NHS outside of hospital. We provide urgent out of hours care to 2/3 of the population. Yet we are nearly invisible to some system leaders. Maybe they don’t like us. Maybe we are too awkward. Maybe we don’t fit and they know it, and hope we go away. Or maybe they know we aren’t where the problems are, and they are mainly focused on the problems. Maybe NHSE and DHSC are just a mess and half the staff are facing redundancy. Or maybe the NHS is simply a massive, complex system equivalent in size to the Hungarian or Moroccan economies. Influencing a system of that scale is a Sisyphean task. We keep on regardless! The Plan ends with a Wes Streeting afterword entitled "Be the Change", which many will know, is the well-established motto of the social entrepreneur. While the system largely ignores us, and even puts barriers in our path, it also seems to be moving our way, and trying to build an NHS more like us. While we aren't winning (though also maybe not losing) the battle of ideas and policy, across the country we are winning in practice, through the daily work of our members and their staff, leading the way. Health and care social enterprises will carry on delivering the future, whatever the plan. To see a few examples of how social enterprises are already transforming the delivery of health and social care across the country, read our series of case studies produced in partnership with King's Fund and Baxendale.

For impact to work, it can’t exist in a silo. Most profit-focused businesses are beholden to their shareholders and owners to generate as much revenue as they can, with no real obligation to give back. That is not the focus of social enterprise. Our business model centres purpose, and the best way to purposely serve your community is to work with the community. Cooperation is the name of the game. A strong role model of purpose-led community activity can be found in Ashford, named a Social Enterprise Place thanks to its collaborative ecosystem. “Collaboration throughout the social enterprise sector in Kent is really important,” said Rebecca Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Social Enterprise Kent (SEK). “We find through networking and bringing people together at conferences, events and training sessions, it creates a touchpoint to spark ideas and raise issues. It’s about bringing people together as a team and not working in silos is what makes the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector stronger.” Our member SEK have nurtured this impact community as they have done for the past 40 years. To find out more, we visited them at their new, volunteer-run SE Kitchen, now their second social supermarket in the county after Ramsgate. Ashford MP Sojan Joseph visiting the SE Kitchen They transformed this former art supply shop into a real community space, providing affordable and healthy grocery options from food charity FareShare as well as other suppliers working closely with local farmers (it is the garden of England after all). Of course, this work wouldn’t be possible without vital partnerships. In fact, they work with more than 100 partners, consistently delivering at least £1 millon a year in funding, allowing them to support great projects like the Social Impact Gateway or Thanet Social Enterprise Boost. From working with East Kent Health Care Partnership to highlight health inequalities to partnering with corporate organisations such as Amey for their Elevate programme creating apprenticeship opportunities for care leavers, they demonstrate how these conversations across organisations form a lynchpin of positive influence. After a delicious lunch provided by Lily’s Social Kitchen, we visited more of the local social enterprises which make up the rich network of organisations in our Places programme. These were some of the businesses championing the movement: Chatting with the volunteers at The Beehive Ashford The Beehive Ashford - a shop which not only sells second-hand clothes, but also provides skills workshops, a volunteer-run café, and hosts several clubs including knitting and a book club. It also offers women referred by local services a place to access free clothing. Made in Ashford - a vibrant and popular gift shop which started its life as a pop-up ten years ago. It houses the handmade craftworks of more than 70 artists from across Kent in-store and online. The Coachworks - a trendy, repurposed multi-use space by the train station hosting street food, live music and entertainment events, and workspaces. Going back to the central theme of collaboration, it shows there’s a concerted effort for social entrepreneurs in the area to pool their resources, doing much more for the community, local economy and environment than they could on their own. A spirit of camaraderie which helps deliver a better, holistic service. As a Social Enterprise Place, Ashford proves its status as a hot spot for social impact activity thanks to this ethos. Browsing the crafts at Made in Ashford Rebecca added: “It’s been fantastic having Social Enterprise UK down here to see our work. The theme has really been about collaboration across the board with other social enterprises and charities, the wider business community and our public sector partners. It makes our programmes better, allowing our entrepreneurs to be given the right tools and funding to solve the specific problems they are facing in their local community.” As our flagship data shows, there are more than 131,000 social enterprise businesses in the UK, all working towards benefitting people and planet in their own ways. Imagine the possibilities of replicating the collaborative efforts of the impact community we’ve seen here in Ashford across the whole country? This is why we do what we do, and we’re proud to see it going from strength to strength.

If the government was in any doubt about the challenges facing those starting social enterprises, a mixed group of stakeholders presented it with a vivid picture this week.   It was the most recent evidence delivered to the second roundtable of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Social, Cooperative and Community as part of their ongoing inquiry into growing diverse business models.   The highs and lows of social enterprise  Give Your Best (pictured above) was a side hustle that grew into a business for founder Sol Escobar and was supported by ‘tech for good’ grants from organisations such as Innovate UK. Escobar told the inquiry she didn’t know what a social enterprise was as her initiative first began to flourish and described how vital the support ecosystem was.   “I did every single incubator and accelerator I could possibly find, because … I didn't know how to grow this organisation, and they really have just taken me from step to step and taught me how to run this organisation and scale it to become revenue-generating,” Escobar said.  Now 800 to 2000 items of donated clothing are chosen by people in clothing poverty every week through the social enterprise, helping to tackle the £140m worth of clothing that is thrown away annually.   Starting a social enterprise might be an option if you have certain advantages, but what if you don’t? The financial implications for those in this situation were made stark by Bayo Adelaja, founder and CEO of Do it Now Now, which annually supports approximately 150 Black leaders of organisations with business training and grant funding. "Most of the people in our community are earning under £18,000 a year and 27% of them didn't attend university, but they remain pillars of their society and are leaders and changemakers within their community," Adelaja said. "The income they're receiving each year is approximately £32,000 and around 40% of that comes from the salary sacrifice of the directors themselves. The vast majority of them are working full-time jobs and about 40% of them have never received grant funding.”  Adelaja asked the APPG to consider how the government could put in places systems and processes that empower people who don't have the access, schooling or business training of others, but are creating social enterprises in response to communities that need services delivered annually. In particular, she recommended that funding not be project-based, with multi-year funding schemes introduced instead.   “We’ve limped our way through”  Escobar had earlier credited School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) as being instrumental in her development as a business founder. Whilst acknowledging that the “nudge economics” of SSE’s match trading grants and bringing social entrepreneurs together in supportive cohorts to bolster confidence had both worked well, SSE CEO Alistair Wilson was less optimistic about the support ecosystem in general.  "It is interesting to reflect that second-tier support organisations in this country are hanging by a thread. We've limped our way through the last 15 years, and many organisations have gone bust. If the government wants to see this sector thrive, they've got to get behind it in a more serious way," Wilson told the inquiry.  He went on to say that he thought the UK had slipped from being world-leading in social enterprise to “being in tenth place, if you’re lucky” and that he hoped the government would consider how to get the UK’s leading status back. Wilson was backed by Louise Cannon, Director of Social Entrepreneur Support at UnLtd, who also asked that long-term ecosystem building be considered by the government.   Matt Smith, CEO of social investor Key Fund made the point that support organisations like SSE were crucial for equipping passionate social entrepreneurs with the skills and experience to run a business. Like Wilson, he expressed concern at the lack of support organisations that existed now compared to 15 years ago.   Smith also thought that more grant funding could level the playing field in areas of unequal opportunity such as those described earlier in the session by Adelaja. “There's a gap where grants should be playing the role that friends and family would in more affluent communities,” he said.  Fellow social investor Seb Elsworth, CEO of Access called for more mainstream providers to participate in social investment, particularly the state-owned British Business Bank, which manages loan guarantee schemes aimed at SMEs and targets a rate of return of 1.5% for its overall portfolio. “We know most social enterprises are looking for relatively small-scale, flexible, patient, unsecured lending. Providing that kind of finance is difficult to do on a purely commercial basis,” said Elsworth.  Two further evidence-gathering sessions will be conducted before the APPG delivers a report to the government later this year.

Social enterprises had plenty of ideas about the different ways they could significantly increase their positive social impact during the first evidence session of the Social, Cooperative and Community Economy All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)’s inaugural inquiry into the government’s commitment to grow diverse business models this week. Co-op and social enterprise leaders also listed straightforward and low or no cost barriers that the government could remove.  Peter Bundey, CEO of GLL, which operates 254 of the UK’s leisure centres, explained how supporting social enterprises would help with the government’s economic growth ambitions. “A 10% increase in our company would get 100,000 people more active and create 1000 more jobs,” he said. In terms of productivity, this could help a lot with the £138bn lost to sick days, he added. Whilst acknowledging “commendable aspiration” around social value and procurement, Bundey said progress was being held back by “conservative legal restrictions on public service procurement” and asked that the guidance and legislation that surrounds public sector commissioning is clarified.  “We need clarification so that councils can be more agile, more innovative and more prescriptive about wanting civil society organisations rather than turning to lowest cost,” said Bundey.  Peter Westall, Chief Value Officer of the Midcounties Co-op (which runs travel and childcare services as well as the familiar local Co-op shops) told the inquiry “We could do more, but the biggest challenge we face is cost pressures.”   The inquiry heard that a more unified, strategic approach to supporting the social enterprise sector was needed, with greater support, legislative reform, better access to finance, and a greater understanding of the value social enterprises bring to the economy and society.  Legislation  With revenues of £850m, 650,000 members and 6000 employees, Mid Counties Co-op made a profit of £12.4m last year but faces an increased National Insurance bill of £9.3m following changes for employers introduced in April.  Westall thought the government could help by changing ‘one size fits all’ legislation that means Midcounties Co-op face similar business rates and taxes on plastic packaging for their shops as supermarkets that operate giant stores in retail parks. His view was echoed by Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) CEO Peter Holbrook, who asked the government to consider how tax could be used to incentivise good behaviour for businesses, particularly around business rates and corporation tax.   Grace Harrison, Organisational Development Lead at Kitty’s Launderette (pictured above), a coop and community hub in Liverpool, asked that community right to buy legislation be tightened up so social enterprises could find properties to operate from.   Harrison also introduced an idea she’d encountered in Italy, where legislation requires both public and private employers with more than 15 employees to hire a certain percentage of disabled people. Employers can also fulfil the quota by entering into agreements with social value organisations. “This has massively transformed the access to work opportunities for disadvantaged groups,” said Harrison.  Access to finance  Finding investment to grow remains an issue for social enterprises irrespective of size. Midcounties Co-op is one of the biggest UK childcare providers offering nearly 4000 places and Westall explained they’d like to expand this service but “as a co-op we are unable, as other business types are, to go to the city and raise funds. How do we get additional finance backing to enable us to do the things that we want to do?”. The government has established an advisory group to look at ways of mobilising social impact capital.   Jonathan Atkinson of Carbon Co-op also called for a bigger spectrum of finance options to be made available and described having limited options for using an overdraft from banks unable to assess their business risk as a social enterprise.  More grant-making startup funds were requested by Harrison, who cited a reduction in non-repayable early-stage funding sources.    Support  More awareness and practical support across the board was also requested – for local authority commissioners looking to contract social enterprises and for business support for social enterprises. Westall also suggested that more co-op development agencies were needed, but this was challenged by Baroness Glenys Thornton who thought something broader was needed who said “this isn't just about developing cooperatives, this is about developing social enterprises and social businesses writ large.”  Holbrook thought government officials should establish “a single vision for how cooperatives, mutuals, and social businesses can collectively recover our economy.” He suggested this might take the form of a Social Business Unit so that every government department could benefit from a level of expertise and knowledge about these diverse business models.  This was the first of four evidence sessions for the Inquiry. All the evidence presented will now be collated and incorporated into a report that will be delivered to government and other stakeholders later this year.  

Georgia Gould MP tells attendees at the Social Value Leaders’s Summit that she wants to give social value “more teeth, more strength, more clarity”.  Georgia Gould MP, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for public sector reform, has said the government intends to consult on further reforms to public procurement processes, as announced to Parliament in February.  Speaking at the Social Value Leaders’ Summit yesterday, Gould said she wanted to give social value ‘more teeth, more strength, more clarity’ and was keen to explore how to really capture the social value of social enterprises.   “If I’m back here in a year’s time, I want to see a real change in the way government and the public sector buys that is thinking about how we support, incubate and maximise spend with SMEs and social enterprises,” Gould said.   To build on progress thus far, the Government will consult on a range of measures to potentially take forward public procurement processes and drive economic growth, support small businesses, and better support innovation.   Declaring herself “a big believer in social enterprises” Gould was addressing a crowd of nearly 200 social entrepreneurs, commissioners and corporate social value leads gathered for the tenth Social Value Leaders’ Summit at the headquarters of professional services firm PwC in central London.   Gould shared that the potential for procurement as described in the government’s recent National Procurement Policy Statement had captured the imagination of her colleagues in the Cabinet Office. The statement sees public procurement as a key lever to achieving Government aims by sourcing goods and services that deliver value for money and social value.   The challenge that remained was to make sure that the people procuring goods and services really prized social value. “Too often procurement teams are isolated from policy objectives,” she said. “There is a culture change needed across the system and there’s a lot we’re doing to push this forward”.  Smaller contracts, more notice, efficient auditing  The minister was preceded by Gareth Rhys-Williams, Chair of National Highways, who lamented the various instruments available to measure social value and called for a joined-up approach to “avoid a chaos of measures and metrics”. This was important, he said, as a third of all tax money goes on public spending.   To try and create social value, Rhys-Williams explained that National Highways have worked on breaking project work up in order to offer contracts that are manageable for VCSEs to service. He also revealed that the organisation will set targets for VCSE expenditure for the first time from April next year.   The mismatch between what commissioners want and what VCSEs can provide was also touched upon by Karolina Medwecka-Piasecka, East Birmingham Programme Development Manager at Birmingham City Council, who called for better forward planning of significant projects so that VCSEs have time to plan and possibly collaborate. “If you know a big contract is coming it might take three years to build a consortium, so the notice of that contract needs to be very advanced,” she said.   The role of VCSE organisations in delivering a mission-led procurement system had earlier been debated by representatives from Kings College London, facilities management provider MITIE, social enterprise Groundwork and law firm Stone King.   Graham Duxbury, CEO of Groundwork pointed out that, although social value is now part of the procurement lexicon, it’s not always followed through into contract management, with the result that it was too easy for social value to slip down the agenda. Another view on this was offered by Sara Rial, Social Outcomes Lead at business consultancy Jacobs, who told the audience in the last session of the day that she had seen clients she was advising “make big commitments and deliver absolutely zero” in terms of social value.   Fellow panelist Chris Luck, CEO of employment charity Shaw Trust offered some context on the environment in which VCSEs were trying to win contracts, explaining that for most small VCSEs, there were only one or two people working on bids and that for many organisations, the cost of bidding is prohibitive.   Overall, the summit offered a wealth of thinking on the delivery of social value which a more developed procurement system has the power to unlock. We’re grateful to our partners Anthony Collins, Jacobs and PwC for supporting us to host an event which showcased a range of opinions and ideas to further advance a more impactful procurement environment. It feels like we’re at a real turning point for social value, and this is a key theme of our new position paper, which we’d like to share with you. It sets out that this moment is the start not the end of a journey towards mission-driven procurement and will help guide this work going forward.   Over the coming weeks we will also be working on a document bringing out the key learnings from the day.   View some pictures from the Social Value Leaders’ Summit 

The Chancellor is in an almost impossible position, faced with high government debt, low growth, unprecedented pressures on public services at home, and conflict and trade wars abroad. In response, Rachel Reeves’s spring statement announced cuts to the welfare budget, increases in defence, and reductions to overseas aid. For many, this will all feel pretty depressing. Yet real hope lies in every community across the country. As Neal Lawson of Compass puts it, “one critical area to boost is the alternative economy, of co-ops, social enterprises, employee-owned workplaces…  Not only can these organisations help kick start economic renewal, but they can do so in a way that is fairer and more democratic.” We welcome the Government recently committing £10m to community energy, and £20m to co-operative housing. But these relatively small drops won’t double the size of the co-operative and mutual sector, as Labour’s manifesto promises. You can’t grow diverse businesses by investing less with one hand than you are taking away with the other. National Insurance rises for public service providers - without either shareholders or customers to absorb the costs - are undermining viable, mission-led alternatives to the outrageous profiteering and negligence we see in the water industry, in children's care and beyond. Social enterprises, co-operatives and community business are delivering real prosperity that people can feel on their high streets, in their neighbourhoods, and in their pockets. This is where hope lies.

On the fifth anniversary of the first lockdown, academic research shows that social enterprises not only survived during the pandemic - they thrived. Professor Richard Hazenberg and Dr Claire Paterson-Young from the University of Northampton explain.  At the five-year anniversary of Boris Johnson’s lockdown announcement in March 2020, there remain many questions as to the impact of the pandemic on the country’s economy and society.  One area that we still know relatively little about is the impact that the pandemic had on social enterprises and their ability to serve their communities.   Social Enterprise UK research in 2021 found that social enterprises proved resilient, retaining staff and having lower closure rates than other forms of business. But our team at the University of Northampton’s Institute for Social Innovation and Impact (ISII) has now found that social enterprises performed even better than previously thought.  With our new research, we found that not only were social enterprises resilient, but they also grew their turnover and increased staff numbers. Despite the challenges of operating during a pandemic, they also increased the number of people they were helping.   We looked at the financial performance and social impact of 1,507 social enterprises both before and during the height of the pandemic, covering the years 2019-2022.  It used data from the Social Enterprise Support Fund (SESF), delivered by Big Issue Invest and partner organisations, through funding secured from the National Lottery Community Fund.   Misson makes for resilience   Our analysis revealed that in the three years between 2019 and 2022, social enterprises in the sample increased their turnover by 28% and their profits by 89%. As social enterprises, those profits were largely reinvested into their social missions, supporting the groups and communities hit hardest by the pandemic. Not only did the financial statements make for good reading, but staffing levels and the number of beneficiaries supported both rose by 11%.   Moreover, these figures did not come at the expense of trading income. Whilst there was an increase in grant funding, overall proportions of trading income barely changed (-0.7%), illustrating that increases in turnover was balanced between both income streams (grant funding accounted for just over one-third of turnover increases).   How did the sector achieve this during a time of such immense challenge? It should perhaps not come as a surprise, as previous studies during earlier crises (such as the 2008 financial crash), have shown that the nonprofit sector tends to be resilient.   As part of our research, we held interviews with 17 social entrepreneurs and 16 stakeholders from the wider social enterprise ecosystem. These revealed that, for social enterprises, their inherent hybrid focus on both financial and social missions aided their reactions to the pandemic.   Indeed, it was their social focus, commitment to their communities, and ethical approach, which alongside their ability to problem solve and reshape their offers, allowed them to continue to deliver support. Community support offered by social enterprises was significant in reducing isolation, including the delivery of support to enable people to access technology, expansion of counselling for children, and online educational provisions.  It was therefore the multi-mission focus that lies at the heart of social enterprise approaches that supported this resilience.  Lessons to learn from   What does this mean for the social enterprise sector and those seeking to support it? Our sample is not illustrative of the social enterprise sector as it did not contain many micro social enterprises. The data also only runs through to 2022, so doesn’t determine how the organisations developed through the remainder of the pandemic and beyond.   However, the data does show that focusing on both financial sustainability and benefiting communities can prove an asset for organisations, at least when reacting to crises. Supporting more businesses to improve the integration of social mission at strategic levels and critically assess their community operations can support not only their resilience and sustainability but deliver wider economic and social benefit.    Perhaps most importantly, the data shows that social enterprise proved resilient and focused on delivering for their communities, despite the many challenges faced. As the UK faces ongoing challenges in public services delivery, spending cuts, and social tensions, support to allow social enterprises to expand further is vital, not least as a protection measure against the next big crisis.  The full, open access paper with the complete findings of the research, can be found here.  This article is part of SEUK’s Social Enterprise Knowledge Centre University Network – to find out more please contact research@socialenterprise.org.uk

Social enterprises present a great opportunity to improve life in the UK. Now a group of MPs will collaborate to help realise their potential. Patrick Hurley, MP for Southport, explains why he wanted to chair the group.  In my constituency of Southport and the wider area there are many social enterprises, cooperatives and community businesses delivering vital public services, community cohesion, innovating products and services and generating employment and inclusion. Businesses like these are powerful as they offer real value for people and planet and many do so at scale. They offer a fast-track solution to improving life in the UK for millions. Yet they still represent just 5% of UK businesses.  There have been numerous false dawns for social enterprises over the past twenty years. So much so, that any new attempt to create a buzz around the concept is likely to be greeted with a raised eyebrow and a knowing smile. Much more pragmatic, then, to accept that the path to a social economy is a gradual one, a path that accepts the reality of a mix of business structures, a path that is not paved with gold, but which is covered with a thicket of brambles needing to be cleared.  Late last year, as a relatively new MP, I was elected to be the new Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for our sector - a group we chose to call the Social, Cooperative and Community Economy APPG - and have since been working to develop a programme of work and an approach to growing the capacity and potential of the sector in the current economic and political landscape. Working closely with others in both the Commons and the Lords over the last couple of months on our plans, we’re now keen to make tracks on our agreed priorities for the year.  The business and governmental context that the social economy sector works in has changed fundamentally over the past couple of decades; indeed, it has changed fundamentally more than once. The availability of finance on a patient basis, the ability to trade while fulfilling community interest requirements, the need to step into the gap left by retreating public services - all these factors and more have evolved, and impacted the way social economy organisations go about their business. The time is therefore right to see if the regulatory systems, the legislative environment, and the funding landscape are what the sector needs for the next 10-15 years.  The UK is home to a robust ecosystem of support networks that encourage innovation within the social enterprise sector. From accelerators to mentorship programmes and collaborative hubs, these resources help early-stage social entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of scaling their impact while staying true to their core values. By fostering a collaborative environment, the UK has become a hotbed for social innovation, leading the way for other nations to follow suit. But there is always more we can do, and the APPG committee is determined to help grow the sector in a way that hasn’t been possible in recent years.   As we look ahead, it is clear that the future of business in the UK should increasingly be shaped by social enterprises. As the government makes decisions on public service delivery and as local government begins to rebuild after a prolonged period of austerity, it’s an opportune time for the sector to step up once again to help shape the future of the UK’s business landscape and tilt it in a more social direction.