What do the following have in common: YouTube; Blogger; GMail? That’s right — they’re all owned by Google and they’re all free. How did an online search engine — that gives virtually all of its services away for free — grow, in just 400 weeks, into a $20 billion turnover global corporation?

I’m reading Ken Auletta’s fascinating book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. Auletta writes on media industry matters for the New Yorker and is one of the US’s most popular business writers. He also has a clean, fluent, efficient prose style that makes his work a pleasure to read. There’s a very interesting review of the book here by the Guardian’s John Lanchester.

Auletta makes the point that the internet is probably nowhere near as revolutionary and life-changing a phenomenon as the discovery of electricity or the invention of the telephone. What is genuinely remarkable about change in the digital age, however, is its velocity, he says. And nowhere is this velocity more evident than in the Google story.

Auletta has a very interesting article here on the Fortune website in which he explains ‘ten things that Google has taught us’.

I was interested to see that ‘focused passion’ is one of the critical factors he identifies. But “without vision,” he says, “even the most focused passion is a battery without a device.” ‘Don’t be evil’ [Google's famous corporate slogan], Auletta says,  ”is a vague incantation” — but the founders’ commitment  ”to make ‘all the world’s information available and to first and foremost serve users’, is a vision,” he concludes.

Certainly the Google business model is applicable in only a relatively small number of quite narrow contexts — devising an algorithm that enables your company to become the gateway to the world’s information while having to create none of it is a business strategy open to only a few. But the broader lessons Auletta identifies — about change, about putting the customer/user first, and the paramount importance of ‘focused passion’ do have wider applicability.

One thing I can guarantee: read Auletta’s book and you will never open a Google home-page again without remembering that a real, live flesh and blood business, employer of 20,100 people around the world, lies behind that familiar, even comforting (it was intended to be), six-letter brand name on your PC screen.

Highly recommended.

For those who haven’t spotted this, Resident University is an initiative to help skill-up Birmingham’s ‘resident experts’ — the people who live and work in neighbourhoods in the city.  Its aim is to help residents make the most of their skills and get actively involved in paid and unpaid work. You can read more about this idea here, and follow-up with details of the free two-day series of workshops and events the RU is holding on the 26th and 27th March.

Social Enterprise mag has an interesting story about NHS service delivery by social enterprises. In the last few days, the Co-operation and Competition Panel for NHS-Funded Services has dropped a case it had been investigating since 5 January, brought by the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) and the NHS Partners Network.

The case focussed on a decision by NHS Great Yarmouth and Waveney to withdraw a tender opportunity to the community sector after health secretary Andy Burnham described the NHS as the ‘preferred provider’ of NHS services. The panel dropped the case after receiving a letter from the Department of Health director general in charge of commissioning and system management.

ACEVO chief exec Stephen Bubb claims that the NHS has muzzled its own panel. An item on his blog says that the Dept of Health has intervened to prevent the competition Panel hearing the complaint and has cancelled the whole commissioning process in East of England.

Bubb says this this is “a disgusting example of political manipulation” and that ever since Burnham announced that the third sector is no longer a preferred provider to the NHS and that competition is to favour state provision ACEVO has heard countless stories from its members about how relationships with commissioners are deteriorating.

In fact, the Health Service Journal (HSJ) has gone as far as to say that the Co-operation & Competition Panel is being gagged precisely to stop Burnham’s “preferred provider” policy being exposed as illegal.

Recently a group of us were talking about major market opportunities for social enterprise. One of the group was incredibly enthusiastic about the government’s new ‘feed-in tariff‘ scheme. This pays householders, businesses and community groups to micro-generate power from renewable sources and sell it back — at a profit — to the National Grid. Friends of the Earth have been very vocal in welcoming the scheme, one of the provisions in the Energy Bill.

What we were talking about specifically was the opportunity which this creates for social enterprises to enter the market not just for the installation of solar panels and so forth, but also for their manufacture.

And then on Tuesday 2nd March I read George Monbiot’s piece in the Guardian, “Are we really going to let ourselves be duped into this solar panel rip-off?”

Monbiot absolutely hammers the feed-in tariff scheme. According to him it will be environmentally ineffective and a waste of public money. It does nothing, Monbiot claims, except accord with the aspirations of the middle classes — the solar panel the next must-have status symbol, ideal in that it signifies both “wealth and moral superiority”.

I do love a good polemic, but my God, these environmentalists are even more vituperative in their arguments than us social enterprise folks. I would really appreciate it if some our environmentally aware readers could explain the pros and cons of this idea in easy to follow terms. Good or bad? Effective or a con? A great opportunity for social enterprise or a scandalous waste of public money? Over to you.

The Dept for Business & Skills has funded the Business Link network to deliver a new free employment law advice and guidance service.

Given that all recent research suggests that social enterprises and third sector organisations are always looking for free or low-cost advice in this area, the service may be of wide interest.

Go to:

www.businesslink.gov.uk/employingpeople or click here.

Enta, which has just completed the biggest project management exercise of its thirty year history — the complete redesign and refitting of its new flagship premises at Mill Wharf, Aston (see earlier post) — has become the third social enterprise in Birmingham to qualify to use the Social Enterprise Mark. As previously covered here, business support provider iSE and community health enterprise Gateway Family Services have both been awarded the Mark in the past few months.

Many in the sector are now aware of the benefits that the Mark can offer and hope that it can do for social enterprise what the Fairtrade logo has done for the fairtrade movement.

Awarding the Mark to Enta, Lucy Findlay, who works for the Social Enterprise Mark company, said, “Social enterprises come in all shapes and forms so it’s great to see a vital, local training organisation understanding the importance of being part of the wider social enterprise brand — it will help Enta promote its business ethics and values.”

Enta moved into its new flagship premises in December 2009. Facilities there include a Vocational Training Centre, a Canalside Training Café, Conference Facilities, Enta’s Catering Service, a Day Care Nursery, a Careers Library and lots more. Enta also runs the Lakeside Children’s and Family Learning Centre in Kingstanding.

The Social Enterprise Mark has only been a nationally available brand since February of this year so it’s great to see social enterprises in Birmingham being early adopters.

Congratulations to everyone at Enta.

Today’s Guardian includes a four-page supplement called Good Business — a social enterprise special, “paid for by the Social Investment Business, all editorial content commissioned by the Guardian, to a brief agreed with the Social Investment Business” (as the Guardian so carefully puts it).

Unfortunately, the articles that make up the supplement don’t all seem to be available on the Guardian website, but some of them are. A longish piece in which key players in the sector answer the question, “social enterprise: what next?” is here, on the Guardian blog.

The front-page article by Patrick Butler appears not to be available, which is a shame, because it contains some interesting snippets. It draws heavily on the recently launched Social Enterprise Coalition manifesto, SEC’s main campaigning tool for the forthcoming election, but in the piece Butler uses an interesting formulation.

He describes social enterprises as “for profit organisations set up to benefit the community”.

I thought that was fascinating, because in such a carefully choreographed supplement — in which one can guess that pretty much every word has been examined by a team from the Social Investment Business — the description is clearly not accidental.

Is it a helpful one?

Third Sector Online has an interesting piece by Sam Conniff, co-founder of social enterprise Livity. Conniff says that for too long the social enterprise sector has been talking to itself. The sector is “losing out on a lot of business because it lacks the confidence to raise its profile outside the public sector” he says, and needs to dramatically improve its marketing and communications.

Conniff welcomes O2’s announcement that it intends to do more to support social enterprise, including developing services specifically aimed at the sector.

It seems extraordinary that both Labour and the Conservatives are working flat-out to woo the co-op movement, but they are. Speaking recently, Gordon Brown — the first Co-operative Party member to ever become Prime Minister, incidentally, has said that co-operative and mutual ideals will be an integral part of Labour’s platform in the forthcoming manifesto.

And this morning, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, told R4’s Today programme that under a Conservative government public sector workers will have the right to form employee-led co-operatives to deliver services in such areas as primary schools, job centres and nursing teams. Oddly, he went on to claim that this policy would effect “as big a transfer of power to working people” as the sale of council house homes in the 1980s.

But the story gets even stranger than this.

In 2007 Cameron established the Conservative Co-operative Movement. The CCM’s first publication, Nuts & Bolts: How to Start a Food Co-operative, claims that food co-ops are inherently conservative and entrepreneurial but also offer an alternative community-based model to the stranglehold of monopoly supermarket capitalism. It’s by Amy Coyle, the sister-in-law of Jesse Norman, Conservative writer and thinker (as his blog describes him) and prospective parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party for Hereford.

Writing in the Guardian, Norman has gone further, claiming that the assumption that co-ops are “intrinsically leftwing” is fundamentally mistaken, because, first, the values they espouse (”voluntarism, personal responsibility, teamwork, shared ownership, independence, the importance of education and mutual support, and concern for the wider community”) are “rather small-c conservative; second, because the energy, vision and entrepreneurship needed to make a co-op succeed are characteristic of capitalism at its best; and third, because co-ops are not generally seen as leftwing in other countries, notably the US.

It seems, then, that Conservatives see there is a prize to be won if co-op ideals can be ‘detached’ from the Labour movement (which may not be difficult: many in the co-op movement would say they only hang on by the weakest of threads in any case) and reinserted as key aspects of what radical conservative thinker Phillip Blond has called “communitarian civic Conservatism”. (Blond is the ex-theology lecturer who caused a massive stir in political circles last year with his book Red Tory.)

So, is this all just a cynical manoeuvre for votes by both right and left, or is a more fundamental ideological realignment in process?

Certainly, it does seem to be the case that some parts of the social enterprise movement share  a curious near-convergence of thinking with radical Tory circles. For example, Blond and his disciples believe that neoliberal economic policies must be challenged in order to counter the centralisation of power and wealth inherent in capitalist monopolies. Blond wants to see greater community ownership of assets and wealth so that the barriers to market entry — to owning and trading — for ordinary people are removed. Social entrepreneurs want to see as many state services (’public assets’) as possible delivered by social enterprises.

In this, both radical Tories and social entrepreneurs share a distrust of the state as ‘welfare provider’. Both believe in — but clearly have different interpretations of — the ‘market’. Blond sees the potential for a new kind of popular capitalism (for “recapitalising the poor”, as he has put it); social entrepreneurs see the potential for building a ’social marketplace’ which would have similar community empowerment qualities. And New Labour, of course, has spent over a decade ‘marketising’ the third sector.

What do others think? Is social enterprise the unwitting tool of both left and right as the main political parties seek to hammer out a new interpretation of market values?

I think the social enterprise movement has some serious thinking to do about where it does sit in relation to the market, to state provision, and most importantly in terms of its core political values…

Further to this post, and this on the new national Social Enterprise Mark — which was relaunched recently at Voice10, it seems that opinion is now divided regarding how stringent the mark is in its qualifying criteria.

While John Bird has pledged to secure the Mark so that it can appear on the front cover of every copy of The Big Issue, the Social Enterprise Coalition’s Scottish counterpart, Senscot, has declined to adopt the Mark.

In an email bulletin to its members, Senscot has said: “During last year, Senscot was in discussions with our counterparts in England about the establishment of a Social Enterprise Mark – and its implications for Scotland… towards the end of the process, more persuasive forces (probably Whitehall) have determined that the eligibility criteria for SEM should be softened – to enable it to become a high volume/quick impact instrument…. this strategy is short-sighted and not the route we would choose in Scotland.  The upshot is that, as things stand, we no longer feel able to wholeheartedly support the SEM – and intend to decline the opportunity to be the Scottish partner.”

So — is the Mark soft touch? An an easy-to-get, ‘high volume’ award more focused on a quick political return than it is public credibility and quality?

It would be great to hear what some holders of the Mark think.

Further to Mark Ellerby’s post on the Cadbury buy-out, I was interested to see today, in Peter Holbrook’s blog — he’s the new CEO at the Social Enterprise Coalition — these comments. Holbrook is referring to a recent piece in the Financial Times:

I love that the FT is writing about social enterprise, but I don’t love it when they call Green and Black’s a social enterprise.  They’re tasty and organic, but only one bar was ever fair trade and that was Maya Gold. Neither fair trade nor organic alone = social enterprise.

Holbrook goes on to make the point that for social enterprises the purpose of social change cannot be ‘discretionary’ — something that owners may choose to contribute to: “they should be fundamentally about social change”.

Speaking about the Social Enterprise Mark, which has just been relaunched as a national (rather than regional) Mark at Voice10, Holbrook says: “What I want the Mark to do is cut through the confusion and the misinformation”. It’s up to social enterprises, he concludes, to say what they are and what they believe.

Given the recent debates we have been engaged in — not least in the context of Call Britannia, in this post — I think a new leader at SEC who is setting out from day-one to establish some clarity regarding the aims, purpose and parameters of social enterprise is to be warmly welcomed.

The recent report of the National Equality Panel, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK (published by the Government Equality Office and produced by a team co-ordinated by The Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion — CASE — at the London School of Economics) is now available to download free of charge from the CASE website here. You can download the whole thing (470pp), a summary (50pp), or an executive summary (6pp).

The sheer scale and complexity of the data makes it pretty hard to digest, but the analysis (here in the Guardian and elsewhere) is clear. Inequality begins with social origins — class; is compounded by education;  perpetuated by employment and income; and widens over the course of a lifetime.

Who knew?

It’s true that that’s a very tempting — almost irresistible — response, but make no mistake, in terms of public policy this will be a hugely influential report, not least in reinforcing the new legal duty on local authorities (introduced in the Equality Bill) to address socio-economic inequality.

And certainly some of the facts and figures do emerge powerfully. For instance, the researchers analysed the total wealth accrued by households over a lifetime. By the time they draw close to retirement (aged 55-64), the top 10% –  higher professionals –  have amassed wealth of £2.2m, including property and pension assets. The bottom 10% of households, however, led by routine manual workers, will amass less than £8,000.

Today, in front of an invited audience of around 100 people, the new regional social enterprise prospectus, Social Enterprise: The Time is Now, was launched at the ICC.

The prospectus — developed by Social Enterprise West Midlands in collaboration with key networks and enterprises in the region — is intended as a ‘tool’ rather than a ‘report’, a means  of engaging with and gaining the support of key players and partners.

The SEWM team did a great organisational job in making a quite large and ambitious programme run as smoothly as clockwork, but they were assisted in this by the superb chairing and facilitation skills of  Jon Argent, CEO of Leominster social enterprise Halo Leisure. Jon acted as MC-cum-chair and did a brilliant job, especially in steering the interactive sessions where delegates used a keypad messaging system to post comments and questions about the prospectus in real-time. (If I can find out what this technology is called I’ll post something about it — it really did add a quite different dimension to the proceedings.)

The prospectus sets out a five-year vision for a growing and increasingly influential social economy in the region, but it is also split up into a series of ‘calls to action’ aimed at different groups of stakeholders — the basis for a new dialogue (and new business!) with customers, partners and public service commissioners.

What it made me realise (again) is how complex a process is involved in mobilising the support, enthusiasm, resources, opportunities and efforts of a wide range of (largely institutional) partners and stakeholders. First you have to identify these ‘market segments’. Then you have to develop messages which will engage them. The prospectus does this.

But then comes the hard bit. Having engaged partners (from whatever sector — but this is especially the case with the public sector), we then need to work out practical things we want them to do. How do we translate that engagement into achievable action?

We need to get cleverer at this. We need to find ways of engaging with partners in which there is a shared understanding about how to create — or capitalise on — market opportunities, and especially how we work together to seize the big strategic opportunities. That’s the challenge.

And as Freer Spreckley, SEWM chair reminded us at the start of event, it isn’t all about public services, important as this driver is. It’s also about social enterprises developing and extending their own ‘independent’ marketplace.

Now we all need to download the prospectus and work out the best and most effective ways we can put it to use.

Congratulations to SEWM for a smooth and successful event.

The Colebridge Trust has just been informed by Capacitybuilders that it has been successful in securing funds to replace its mobile exhibition cum office cum consultation vehicle. The new Community Bus will replace the previous vehicle which was taken out of service last year after 23 years of service as a mobile library and community space.

The new bus should be on the road in April and is available to hire, complete with driver, by any charity, voluntary, community, social enterprise, public or private sector organisation. The bus is a highly effective way of taking your service or cause directly to the community.

Call Charles Rapson on 0121 770 8222 or email charlesr@colebridge.org if you are interested in taking advantage of this.

BSSEC member ART (Aston Reinvestment Trust) — one of the longest-established community finance providers in the UK — is starting the new year with over £2m to lend to businesses in Birmingham and Solihull that cannot get finance from conventional sources. This includes lending to social enterprises.

We’re in a position to lend twice as much in the coming year as we did last year thanks to new support from Birmingham City Council and Be Birmingham — together with continued funding and support from a host of other private and public investors.

ART is an independent mutual organisation — like an old-fashioned building society — which lends between £10,000 and £50,000 to businesses in Birmingham and Solihull unable to secure any, or all, of the finance they need from a bank. We’ve seen a massive jump in its lending as banks have taken a risk-averse attitude to small enterprises.

ART loans can be used alone or as part of a package of finance and can be unsecured or secured, with repayment periods of up to five years. They can be used for any business purpose, including supporting cashflow.

The Trust is a member of the Fair Finance Consortium, a group of independent lenders who — with the support of AWM and in some cases their local councils and other private sector investors — collectively ensure that small businesses and social enterprises across the West Midlands can access loan support of up to £50,000.

Further to this post, Action for Blind People has just announced a free open-day event — with lunch — to spread the word about its Social Enterprise & Employment Development project. The event, called A Real Eye Opener, takes place at the Concept Conference Centre, Birmingham, on the 5th March 2010. You can download a flyer about the event here: Action Email Flyer

The event is aimed especially at social enterprises interested in building their staffing capacity by offering employment placements to skilled and motivated blind and partially sighted people.

Social entrepreneurs, business support agencies, local authorities and other key public sector partners will be gathering at Birmingham’s ICC on the 27th January for a major launch of a new regional vision for social enterprise, organised by SEWM.

The half-day event will see the launch of The Time is Now, a social enterprise prospectus for the West Midlands, that calls for greater understanding, support and innovation to make social enterprise the first choice in the region. More than 100 delegates will discuss the challenges and opportunities facing one of the economy’s fastest growing sectors.

Kevin Maton, Network Director of SEWsays, “The prospectus aims to galvanise everyone who operates in the sector from the social entrepreneurs who make it happen, to the consumer who benefits, the public sector who procure services and business support agencies who are there to facilitate growth… In order to achieve this we need everyone to be on board and respond to the calls to action we will be setting out.”

There may still be a few places left — if you want to be part of ‘The Time is Now’ call Sandra Crowder at SEWM on 02476 633911.

I know it’s a bid odd to be talking about a major PLC on the BSSEC blog but when you look back at the origins of Cadbury and its early development there are a great deal of similarities with modern day Social Enterprise: the community theme, the environment and the social aims for the workforce and families.

It could be argued that as Cadburys has got bigger and more commercial it has moved away from some of their original values, but maybe the recent decision to buy organic chocolate Green and Blacks and the swap to use Fair-trade ingredients for Dairy Milk showed a return to them?

However, the recent news that Kraft is to purchase Cadbury is maybe not such good news. As the price of the shares go up the temptation to sell (or sell-out) increases – ultimately only the share holders win. What happens next will probably be a cycle of decline as Kraft seeks to get an ever increasingly profitable return on the investment made.

Over the next few years we may well be seeing the end of any further fair-trade development and an end of the not so profitable ranges; break ups will be on the cards, as will redundancies and closures – all for the sake of more profit for Kraft (or whichever company eventually buys Cadburys). A move so far away from Cadburys beginnings and so far away from Social Enterprise.

So what’s the lesson for Social Enterprise? Get your legal structure right? Don’t get too big? Maybe there’s nothing at all…it’s just a very sad day for Birmingham and the region. Of course, there’s always a silver lining as today may well be the time to start a Social Enterprise manufacturing and selling chocolate!

Enta CIC has just completed the biggest project management exercise of its thirty year history — the complete redesign and refitting of its new flagship premises at Mill Wharf, Aston. I was very pleased to get the guided tour — and lunch — from Pam Wood and Charlotte Light just before Christmas. I don’t think I have ever seen two people so proud of their organisation’s new premises and facilities.

After more than a year of research, planning and negotiation Enta successfully agreed terms with property group Cannock who purchased Mill Wharf and organised refurbishment by Heyford Contracting to Enta’s specifications.

The refurbishment was financed by the developers and Enta has taken a 20-year lease with a view to creating a strong work-based learning, training, careers guidance and social enterprise hub at the gateway of Birmingham’s Learning Quarter. A successful capital bid to the LSC will fund the purchase of further training equipment for the Centre.

The brightly painted Mill Wharf building has the air of a retro cruise liner – fitting for Enta’s vision to progress learners to new life destinations – and is accessible to people with reduced mobility.

The building is divided into Training, Conferencing, Nursery, Café and Office areas over two floors. The Training Centre has 11 rooms equipped for the vocational and functional skill areas offered to young people and adult learners, a careers library and a training café opening to the public on the 15th Feb 2010.

The beautifully appointed first floor Conferencing Suite has capacity for up to 120 delegates and is flooded with natural light. It offers full in-house hot and cold catering and free parking.

There are plans in 2010 to extend Enta’s range of social enterprises by the opening of a custom-equipped 45 place Day Care Nursery to serve the local area and offer Care to Learn places for learners.

Kevin Hayes, Enta’s CEO says, “We are very excited about this long awaited move. It gives Enta even greater opportunities to impact the lives of young people and adults facing barriers to training and employment. We look forward to welcoming learners and clients to our well equipped and well located new Centre”.

Enta’s move provides the organisation with stronger income streams and the potential to enter new markets, and will help generate additional revenue to underpin its core work.

If you would like to see the building and have a tour, contact Charlotte Light on 0121 380 4800 – she’d be delighted to introduce you to Mill Wharf.

Enta really have raised the bar for third sector training providers working with young people. Congratulations to everyone involved.

iSE recently held a staff team building day with the help of Ignite Creative. We donned our creative hats to produce a short film reflecting the values and services of iSE. The day was intended not just to bring everyone together but also to help us embrace the kind of social marketing techniques that are increasingly available and offer really cost-effective tools for social enterprises.

And here is the result of our creative efforts!

Do take a look — we really enjoyed making it and want to explore the use of self-created videos much more in our marketing.

I like and admire Matthew Parris. He writes wonderfully, is genuinely self-deprecating and modest, and has a marvellous broadcasting voice. It’s a shame he’s a Tory, really.

Anyway, he has a very interesting piece in the Times Online about Cameron’s declaration for voluntary action and social enterprise as alternatives to the ‘big state’.

In just a few hundred words Parris manages to set this new philosophy in its wider context of Conservatism, Darwinism, social philanthropy, and Christianity.

It presents some practical difficulties, Parris acknowledges, “not least [that] of delivering state-sponsored help via non-state agencies” and goes on to warn: “The State has a terrible potency to kill the thing it loves: just look at the arts.”

I disagree with virtually everything else in the piece but he’s dead right on that point about the arts.

The Co-op Bank has just published its ninth Ethical Consumerism Report. This story in yesterday’s Guardian also covers the key facts and figures.

Despite the economic downturn, ethical spending by consumers continues to rise, according to the report, with overall ethical spending rising from £13.5bn in 1995 to almost £35.5bn at the end of 2007. In 2008, on average, every household in the UK spent £707 in line with their ethical values. Are social enterprises that operate in the consumer marketplace doing everything they can to capture a bigger share of this spending?

While ethical spending remains a small part of overall consumer spending (over £600bn), the report reveals that generally speaking ethical markets have proven more resilient throughout the recession.

The greatest growth in ethical spending between 2006 and 2007 has been in:

• Free range & ‘freedom’ foods, up from £18m to £28m (+56%).
• Energy-efficient lightbulbs, up from £26m to £41m (+58%).
• Fairtrade, up from £285m in 2006 to £458m in 2007 (+61%).
• Ethical clothing, up from £52m to £89m (+71%).
• Green cars, up from £96m to £223m (+132%).

Farmers’ markets and charity shops have been amongst the few ethical sectors to see a downturn.

The resilience of ethical markets, especially Fairtrade, should come as good news to social enterprises — if only the sector could find a successful way of building up the kind of goodwill and ‘brand identity’ the Fairtrade movement has.

But I wonder why the report includes no figures at all for spending with social enterprises? True, many social enterprises, perhaps the majority, are providing business-to-business and institutional services rather than consumer products, but this is by no means universally the case. Certainly, these figures would look dramatically different if social enterprise turnover was included.

As this is the last post for 2009, it’s time to wish our friends, colleagues and readers everywhere a happy, prosperous and peaceful New Year.

Well, here’s another slant on the kind of issue we have been discussing here…

The Sunday Times website has an absolutely excoriating piece by John Arlidge called What Tony Blair did next after Downing Street. It’s about Blair’s globe-trotting ‘good works’, his commercial consultancy and his so-called philanthropy. Amazingly, Blair has the brass balls to claim: “I’m a social entrepreneur now. I can engineer social change on my own terms, outside of a big government bureaucracy.”

Blair’s money-making includes £2m a year to provide ‘global strategic advice’ to JPMorgan, a similar amount from Zurich Financial Services, in addition to contracts secured by his commercial consultancy group, Tony Blair Associates, which advises Mubadala, the state-owened Abu Dhabi investment and development company, and the Kuwait government.

Blair is estimated to have made £15m since leaving office. Is he a philanthropist, Arlidge wonders, a social entrepreneur unfettered by stifling bureaucracy, or a hustler on the make with his three USPs of “good governance, hard cash and religion”?

The story is also reported — somewhat more mildly — in the  Financial Times, but read The Sunday Times version — it’s genuinely extraordinary stuff. The Blair Rich Project.

In a recent speech to the Progress group, Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Cabinet Office, has said that as a result of the financial crisis and the implosion of public trust following the MPs’ expenses scandal we are entering a period when new forms of mutual ownership will come into their own as a preferred model for public service ownership and delivery.

Her speech is reported at length in The Guardian, on eGov Monitor, and in GuardianSociety.

A new era of mutualisation is also amongst the plans set out in the recent action plan for government reform and cost-cutting, Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government, previously reported on our blog here.

In her speech Jowell said, “By bringing users, employees, and others together as mutual members of the provider organisation we can successfully get to grips with the supply side of public service.”

She also announced the setting up of a new independent Commission on Ownership, to be chaired by economist/writer Will Hutton.

Jowell is also expected to ask Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and John Healey to look at their respective portfolios for ways to extend mutualism in Sure Start, social care and housing.

There have been some very interesting letters to the Guardian on the subject.

iSE has become the first business support specialist in the region to have its application for the Social Enterprise Mark approved.

SEs seeking to gain the kitemark scheme are assessed by an independent panel using strict qualifying criteria. Applicants must show through their Constitution that a sufficient proportion of the profit made by the business is spent on socially beneficial purposes. They must also show by their activities and their accounts that trading is a key driver and that profit generated is used for social or community benefit. The Mark is intended to enable social enterprises to promote their values-driven business and demonstrate their social outcomes

iSE will be formally awarded the kitemark on 2nd February at the Voice10 social enterprise conference when the SE Mark — originally begun by RISE in the south-west — is officially relaunched as a national scheme.

iSE is only the second social enterprise in Birmingham to acquire the Mark. The first, Gateway Family Services (CIC), received theirs on Social Enterprise Day.

Sarah Crawley, iSE’s CEO, says, “It’s still relatively rare for a business support organisation to be itself an independent social enterprise as iSE is and the SE Mark will really help us get across the message that we practise what we preach. Andy Beaton has done a fantastic job of steering us through the assessment process and I can’t think of a better way of ending our tenth anniversary year.