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6 articles
Councils are under pressure to innovate but rarely want to become investors. A town hall venture studio offers a third way: co-found social enterprises with secondments, procurement guarantees and shared back-office support, taking no equity but earning a return through better services and local resilience.
Community foundations hold long-lived endowments and deep local knowledge. A small, ring-fenced slice of that money could become patient backing for nearby founders — if governance, risk and mission are handled with care.
Most four-day-week trials happen inside one company. A coordinated town-wide pilot would put councils, SMEs, charities and high-street traders in the same experiment, testing whether shorter working time can boost footfall, wellbeing and local recruitment. It is messier than a corporate trial, but that may be exactly why it is worth trying.
Repair has spent a decade as Britain's favourite volunteer hobby. The next stage is harder and more interesting: turning it into paid work, steady contracts and local supply chains. We look at what's actually holding fixers back — and what would let them scale.
Vacant shops are too often treated as a symptom of decline. With the right leases, light-touch planning and council backing, they could become low-cost labs where local founders and social enterprises test what works.
NHS trusts, universities and councils are waking up to their role as economic anchors. From Birmingham to Glasgow, procurement and property are being reimagined as tools for seeding locally owned social enterprises — but policy still lags behind the pilots.