Community Wealth Building in Wigan
A new intent for Covid-19 recovery
Wigan Council’s approach of embedding community wealth building into its Covid-19 recovery plans builds on the underlying conviction of the much-celebrated Wigan Deal – that power should be shared with citizens and solutions codesigned. However, this goes beyond enabling community power as a key tenet of public service reform. Indeed, it is about strong partnering with the community to build community ownership within the commercial economy and counteract wealth extraction. In this, we are seeing a reimagining of how we can make local economies work, underpinned by a commitment to return economic power to local people. Going forward the Council has committed to working in partnership with other anchor institutions across the borough to embed community wealth building principles into procurement policies, recruitment processes and asset management.
Animating the social and solidarity economy
The inherent community wealth building logic of the Wigan Deal has helped to transform the role of the Council into an enabler of the social and solidarity economy. Over the last few years the Council has offered tailored support for CICs, seconded staff, and developed funding and support packages to develop ideas and devolution of control of publicly owned land and property. A good example of this can be found in Sunshine House.
Reforming a sector to improve conditions for the lowest paid workers
In Wigan, spending on adult social care – traditionally a low paid sector – is understood as a key site for shaping employment opportunities and conditions for local people. The Ethical Homecare Framework and work over many years to embed the approach of the Deal among providers has driven up employment standards, fundamentally reformed the economy of the care sector in the Borough and supported the development of more than 100 social enterprises.
