A new study for Power to Change, published this week, reveals that community businesses often sign up to deliver public service contracts in the knowledge that they will make a financial loss. The authors of the study, Professor Tony Chapman and Dr Tanya Gray of Policy&Practice at St Chad’s College, Durham University, said the trend was driven by the community business sector’s commitment to social and financial success when judging contract values. One CEO said:

‘We’ve gone for certain contracts that we feel are crucial to our community. We provide services to people who have quite complex needs. We might not be making any money on it, the reality is that we’re contributing about 12 per cent. But we think it is so important, that we’re prepared to do it because nobody else could do it properly at this price.

’Professor Tony Chapman, who co-authored the report, said:

“The trend is not down to acts of financial desperation, nor that community businesses are complicit in a ‘race to the bottom’ in contract pricing. But community business leaders knew that if profits on contracts were out of the question, then they’d have to make up the difference from other aspects of their trading to sustain vital services.”

Resolving these pressures is virtually impossible for community businesses. So the onus is on local public sector organisations to be more realistic about contract values. But that is easily said in the current fiscal climate. And even though Chancellor, Sajid Javid, announced in this September’s Spending Review that ‘austerity is over’, what this really means is that, at best, things will get no worse.

Suzanne Perry, Research Officer at Power to Change, said: “This research gives us excellent insight into the extent to which community businesses are sacrificing in order to keep local services open in their neighbourhoods. Additionally, the report reveals what adept business people they are – utilising their income to make the place they live better.”

There’s little to be gained by pointing at Public Services (Social Value) Act of 2012. The reality is that public sector bodies need an enormous boost in funding to bring them anywhere near back to where they were in 2010. In the meantime, local public bodies should be applauding community businesses which keep services going in their communities – rather than to assume that they’ll continually be willing and able to do ‘more for less’.

Striking a balance: How community businesses build effective working relationships with public, private and third sector organisations, by Professor Tony Chapman and Dr Tanya Gray. Published 18th September 2019.

Click here for Tony Chapman’s Blog on the report

Click here to download the report

It has been a busy year for us in Policy&Practice as several research projects have been completed and new ones started.

Key highlights of the year include the publication of a series of Third Sector Trends reports for Community Foundation Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Garfield Weston / IPPR North.

A major new study Who Runs the North East Now? was published for Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Institute for Local Government and Muckle LLP.

A new book was also published by the Commonwealth Secretariat on the Contribution of Sport to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

We’re doing new projects for Lloyds Bank Foundation, Big Lottery Fund, Durham County Council and the Economic and Social Research Council  all with reports out next year.

Read all about it in our Annual Report by clicking here: Policy&Practice Annual Report 2017

In January 2018, Professor Kanji Tanimoto from Waseda University, Tokyo, will come to Durham on a two week research visit to St Chad’s College as a Visiting Professorial Fellow.  In addition to the  delivery of  a seminar on 18th January in St Chads, he will meet colleagues from Durham University Business School, Newcastle University Business School and Newcastle Business School (Northumbria University).  Meetings have also been arranged with the Institute for Advanced Studies, Teikyo University and the North East Initiative on  Business Ethics (NIBE).

Kanji Tanimoto is Professor in Business and Society at the School of Commerce, Waseda University, Japan. He recently was Visiting Professor at the Free University of Berlin, Cologne Business School and National Taipei University. Prior to joining Waseda, he was a professor at the Graduate School of Commerce, Hitotsubashi University. He received his doctorate in business administration from the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University.

He is Founder and President of an academy: Japan Forum of Business and Society, which is the first academic society in this field in Japan. He is an editorial member of several journals. He serves on the program committee of the International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility at Humboldt University. He has been consulting and providing advice to leading Japanese companies on CSR management over the last 20 years. He also has advised Japanese government committees on business & society and social business.

His research interests include the relationship between business and society, corporate social responsibility, social business and social innovation. He has published numerous books and papers.

His personal website is: http://tanimoto-office.jp and email address: k.tanimoto@tanimoto-office.jp

Regeneration is usually considered in the here and now.  But what legacy do such projects leave many years on.  Professors Fred Robinson and Alan Townsend have undertaken two projects in Benwell and North Shields as part of the ESRC Imagine research programme hosted by the University’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action.

The first report looks at the history of regeneration in the Benwell area of Newcastle upon Tyne (North East England) after the Community Development Project (CDP) ended in 1978. It provides an account of the development, implementation and impact of regeneration policies. It draws on archive documents including reports and maps and five in-depth interviews with key actors, past and present, conducted in 2014-15.

This account cannot, of course, cover everything that has impacted on Benwell. The principal focus is on the main ‘area-based initiatives’ that have been implemented in the area, especially those that conveyed explicit ideas about an imagined future – what the area might become.  The report shows the context: ideas about what needed to be done and how it should be done and concludes with a statistical section, tracking some key indicators of change in the area over the past 40 years, 1971 to 2011.

The second report looks at North Shields in North Tyneside which looks at the history of regeneration in the North Shields/North Tyneside area after the CDP. The report draws on archive documents including reports and maps and five in-depth interviews with key actors, past and present.

Both reports include a timeline to show the history of area-based policies in Benwell and North Shields, alongside the significant events and the changing local, regional and national political landscape.

Read the reports Benwell…..fortyyearsonrevisedSB4thversionwithexceltimelinespreadsheet23.2.17

NorthShields40yearson5thversionwithexceltimeline2revisedSB23.2.17