Andy Burnham’s diagnosis of the problems facing this country will be familiar to anyone working with or for a community business. Britain is one of the most over-centralised countries in the world. Wealth drains out of local economies faster than it is created. And in too many places (the same places, too often) the high streets, anchor institutions and social infrastructure that hold community life together have eroded, leaving people feeling like the fundamentals of everyday life are beyond repair.
When Burnham says growth cannot be ordered from the top down but has to be nurtured from the bottom up, we recognise the argument, because it is the one we hear and have been making for years.
In Manchester earlier this month, he made the case for good growth in every postcode, a rejection of trickle-down economics, and the rebalancing of power he calls Manchesterism. This adds the economic framing to his speech in The Theos Annual Lecture last year, where he described a country living through a crisis of trust, a state that sees numbers rather than names, and a better way of governing built on connection and delivered through the local organisations communities already trust.
Burnham clearly believes that thriving places need more than economic activity. They need the institutions, relationships and trust that enable people to connect and belong, and that has to be built from the ground up.
We agree. The question is how do we all get a real stake in economic renewal?
The last mile of devolution
This is where we believe community business really adds something. Devolution, a No 10 North, empowered mayors, stronger strategic authorities, is all necessary and overdue. But moving power from Whitehall to the town hall must not be mistaken as the same as putting it in the hands of communities. If good growth is genuinely to reach every postcode, power has to travel the last mile. Out of the centre, through the regions, and into communities.
Otherwise, regeneration still risks happening to places rather than with them, and the sense of agency Burnham rightly wants to rebuild never quite arrives. Community businesses have been building ownership, control and growing the economy in ways that actually reach the communities that need to feel it most. With the right backing and support they can go further to close the gap. Community businesses are owned by and accountable to local people. They create, keep and recycle wealth in the places they serve. They build working relationships between residents, local businesses, anchor institutions and decision-makers. They embody the collaborative, “pull in the same direction” spirit that runs through Burnham’s vision.
Crucially, they build on the assets, relationships and leadership a community already has, rather than importing change from outside. When Burnham reaches back and talks about the Rochdale pioneers of 1844, he is invoking a tradition of communities coming together to change what matters to them, which is still alive today.
This is the opportunity. With the right backing and support, community businesses can go further to close the gap between the wealth created in our places, and the people who should benefit from it. But there is still work to be done to get communities the right powers, capital and capacity to drive lasting economic growth.
Devolving wide and deep
Burnham is right to focus on devolution as a vehicle to unlock local growth. We’ve seen this work first hand, from the West Midlands’ innovative social economy clusters to Liverpool City Region’s investment in Kindred, a social investment vehicle powering community ownership.
But devolution must be wide and deep – stopping at the town hall fails to capture the power, capabilities, and imagination of communities, who are already transforming their local areas into resilient and thriving places.
We see this most visibly on our high streets. Our Community-led High Streets Innovators show the possibilities that arise when communities are in the driving seat of regeneration: more ownership in community hands, and civic spaces powered by care, culture and creativity, meeting the needs of their community. They are real and present examples of how high streets can become Burnham’s “symbols of Britain’s renaissance”.
Local authorities rightly have been given powers to drive high street regeneration – compulsory purchase, rental auction and planning powers – but many struggle to use them. A lack of expert knowledge, capacity, and legal and financial risk aversion all play a part. But it’s also a test case for what happens when devolution falters in the final mile. Residents are frustrated with the lack of change, and local actors like community businesses are left unable to unlock vacant high street spaces.
More powers are starting to appear. The new Community Right to Buy, introduced through the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act, gives communities a right of first refusal over the assets that matter to them. Power to Change campaigned for it and has worked since to get the new right understood and ready to be used on the ground.
But a right on paper is not the same as seeing a building or land securely in community hands. Under the old Right to Bid, only around 15 in every 1,000 listed assets ever came into community ownership. If the Right to Buy is to be more successful, communities need to have the finance, the advice and the organising capacity to act on it. So let’s build on what has gone before. Community businesses occupy this exact ground – they are experts in community ownership who have stewarded assets, usually against terrible odds, long before the Right to Buy.
If moving power is going to drive a different kind of economy, one that works for people and places, devolution needs to be wide and deep, unlocking capital and capacity and building on the expertise already transforming communities.
Reimagining good growth
Investing in community business and community-owned assets matters because it can drive sustainable local growth. Money simply invested in a place is not guaranteed to stick, but money invested in community ownership locks in wealth that can keep paying back.
Community-owned spaces keep 56p of every pound in the local economy, against 40p for large private sector firms, so every space in community hands is a permanent endowment for that neighbourhood. As our recent Keys to the Future report with Locality shows, with the right strategy, investment and support, community ownership can go beyond saving at-risk buildings and spaces by creating inclusive jobs, tackling social isolation and strengthening cohesion.
This investment can be done without increasing borrowing. Andy Haldane, who is informally advising Burnham, has costed out how to unlock investment for devolution. Top-slice the £100 billion plus already committed to Britain’s public financial institutions, and every mayoral authority gets a £1 billion endowment for a Good Growth Fund. But an endowment that stops at the strategic authority level is still the state talking to itself. As Haldane himself puts it, the rewiring has to run “from city hall to city square”, and no one has yet specified the vehicle that carries power and capital that last mile.
Nor does the state need to travel that last mile alone. Government has already built the machinery to bring other capital alongside: the Office for the Impact Economy exists precisely to help blend public money with the £106 billion of impact capital held by impact and social investors and philanthropists.
What the impact economy lacks is a route to the ground floor, a way for that capital to land in structures that lock in public benefit rather than leak out again. Community ownership is that structure. It is the impact economy in its most democratic form: capital raised from and owned by the people it serves, with asset locks that make the impact permanent.
Our solution: take a tenth of Haldane’s tenth. Reserve ten percent of every Good Growth Fund as a community window of patient capital — a Last Mile Fund. Match fund it with community shares, the most local impact investment there is, and invite the Office for the Impact Economy to crowd in public, philanthropic and impact investment alongside. Local people invest and own the result, gaining the capital to use the Community Right to Buy and unlocking diverse community ownership. That is how you connect these ideas for funding to the town square and drive regeneration from the ground up.
Manchester and beyond
I’ve seen what this bottom-up model, with community business at its heart, can deliver – on Burnham’s home turf. This month, the Power to Change board came together in Stretford Public Hall, a Grade II-listed Victorian building in Trafford that was a liberal ‘gift’ to the people of Stretford, later owned by the local authority. It is now owned and run by the community itself, through a community benefit society with hundreds of local members who are also investors.
But Stretford Public Hall should not be the exception. If Burnham is serious about good growth in every postcode, government needs to make places like this the norm and that means going further than the commitments made so far.
Two things would make the difference, and a Last Mile Fund could tie them together. Communities need patient, accessible capital, blending grant and investment, to make the Community Right to Buy real; a right without resources is a right on paper only. Devolution needs the same: every strategic authority should treat community business as economic infrastructure, not an afterthought, with communities owning and shaping the growth plans made in their name. A Last Mile Fund would be the mechanism for both, channelling capital through the trusted institutions that can carry national missions on health, high streets, energy and skills into the neighbourhoods that Whitehall, and even town halls, struggle to reach.
This is work Power to Change wants to do alongside government. We bring a decade of evidence, deep relationships with thousands of community businesses across England, and the practical know-how to turn ambition into delivery. Change for this country will not come from Whitehall alone. It will come from communities with the power, resources and ownership to shape their own futures. The task now is to build that bridge between the two.
