VitaEurope meets the man who changed social entrepreneurship in the UK

Some people really make the difference and Jonathan Bland is certainly one of them.  Founder of SBI (Social Business International),  Bland  has been a leader in the UK social enterprise movement, helping the British Government create a highly innovative policy framework for social enterprise.
With 30 years experience in the field, Bland worked for several cooperatives in London and Wales , after working for five years in Spain, where he developed and managed a series of innovative European projects for the Valencian Co-operative movement.

Social Business International connects people and works across boundaries to learn from the success of others to make positive change in the world. We have met him to talk about social innovation, change and the much criticized Big Society.

What is the situation of social enterprises in the UK? Are you satisfied with the results you have obtained until now?
It’s been a long journey. It all started at the end of the 1990s with people working on the concept of social enterprise. We brought together a group of different kinds of businesses that were trading for a social purpose. At the time there was a relatively new government, Tony Blair’s labour party that ought to be looking at the social enterprises with interest, as new opportunities, but instead ignored it. So we had the need to articulate what social enterprise could do and get into the policies that it needed . We had ten years of very hard work , where people had to come together and think about it. The parliament created a trust to get people to work together and over a period of time we did start influencing the government. We we worked with some individual politicians but at the same time, we were really careful because we didn’t want to make it about just one party. We had a real break in 2006 when we took David Cameron and his shadow cabinet on a tour of social enterprises. When he was elected we had social enterprise in all manifestos and that was a big achievement, because we were such a small lobby. Under the previous government we did a number of things that started to get social enterprises under the policy framework. We had an investment fund for social enterprises just for health and care of 1 hundred million Pounds and a program to help social enterprises established by public services which wanted to do things in a more creative way and that has continued under the present coalition government, although with a slightly different focus and with less resources and time. Another important achievement was the creation of the community interest company, a new company form just for social enterprises. This form uses a light regulation and since its creation in 2006, 5 thousand new businesses have been established, which is a great result because they do not receive any tax breaks and incentives. The launch of the Big Society Capital Bank has marked another important milestone for the third sector, as 400 million pounds have been matched with further investment from private banks to be invested in new projects to support local communities.

Has the big society helped the growth of social enterprise in the UK  over the years?
The Big Society is a policy framework where the government plays a smaller role and more responsibilities are given to the civil society and this can be a good or a bad thing. It could be an excuse to cut resources or a way of empowering people to come up with new solutions answering to the real needs. It has been much criticized and the term is used less and less. However I believe that some things wouldn’t necessarily be overturned if there were a change in power . For example the right to challenge: if there’s a local public service that is not ran well, then the community can take over and have the opportunity to run it. There are some positive things but the term “Big Society” does not have a positive connotation.

We often talk about social innovation but what is the relationship between innovation and social enterprise?
You don’t automatically get social innovation from social enterprise. You can have social innovation in a lot of different contexts but some social businesses can be very backward looking. What you do have with social enterprises is a model that can allow social innovation if the right ingredients come together. Some examples are given by social enterprises who trade in public services. They do things very differently from the public sector buy they still do it with public service values. Last week I visited a place ran by a social enterprise in London, for people who are terminally ill. Although it has medical staff taking care of the guests, it is not a hospital nor a hospice, it’s just a house, there are no uniforms nor hospice rules. A lady moved in with her 13 year old daughter and when they received a call from the care inspectorate arguing that they were not allowed to look after children, they just replied that they were not looking after a child, the child’s mom was. They were actually taking care of the mother. Another man could spend his last weeks there with his dog, which would have never been allowed in an hospice. These are just small stories but they are examples of social innovation. It’s a new culture that is not bound by the public sector rules and offers new creative solutions to help people live better.