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Lewes district – mobilising council assets, decarbonising supply chains

Breakout session: 3.15pm

Behind the plaudits for the “Preston model” lies a fundamental truth about community wealth building: there is no one way to do it. The power of the approach lies in its flexibility to local context and conditions. In these breakout sessions we will delve into the experience of places – who are at different stages in their community wealth building “journey”, in rural and urban contexts, with different challenges and enablers – to draw out the lessons that can be applied to your place.

Lewes is the county town of East Sussex in south east England. While the town and rural hinterlands to its north are relatively affluent, the outlying areas of the district and those areas adjoining the south coast experience high levels of deprivation.

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A green recovery for local economies

Covid-19 and the climate emergency both expose in different ways the fundamental lack of resilience in how we develop local economies in the UK. There has been a lot of talk about how we must “build back better”, but if we want a green recovery worthy of the name, it will mean confronting these underlying issues once and for all.

Local economies are, right now, between a rock and a hard place: the rock – an unprecedented economic collapse, with mass unemployment, business failure, and social destitution for many; the hard place – the looming threat of climate emergency, with every new hot day a reminder that the clock is ticking towards ecological collapse.

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Wealth-building for our local economic recovery

This article originally appeared in the MJ

As we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown, calls for local government to lead the economic recovery are getting louder. Key among these voices are local politicians who have stewarded their places through the last two months. Many are convinced of the imperative to build back better, committed to leaving behind the failed models of trickle-down economics and ready not just to recover, but to embrace progressive reform with ideas such as community wealth-building.

For these local leaders, this unfolding crisis has brought home what they already knew – that the economic model we have followed in recent decades has failed and will fail further if not amended. Far from delivering the promise of prosperity for all, it has left too many less secure and worse off, enriched the already wealthy few and propelled us further down the road to ecological disaster.

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  • Community wealth building should be at the heart of recovery plans as local economies try to rebuild after the pandemic.

    26 May. 2020

    • Economic recovery and reform: the role of community power

    This article originally appeared in the MJ

    Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, our economy was failing many people and the planet. The imperative then was to create an economy that serves our needs, and shares wealth amongst as many people as possible. This imperative has only been amplified by the situation in which we now find ourselves. We believe the surge in community power in response to Covid-19 harbours the key to building back a better economy.

    The recent upsurge in social solidary has been impressive with millions of acts of kindness taking place every day. Within days of the NHS volunteer scheme being announced, over 750,000 people had signed up. The Covid-19 Mutual Aid movement has mobilised 2.5 million people across the UK who are now working with community groups to deliver emergency food parcels.

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  • Local Leader Network Launched

    16 Apr. 2020

  • Covid-19 crisis: Chancellor - we need a debt freeze

    03 Apr. 2020

    • Community Wealth Building in Brighton and Hove 

    (2019 – ongoing) 

    Brighton and Hove Council is working with CLES to embed community wealth building across the organisation as one of three corporate objectives.  

    Context

    • Brighton and Hove is a relatively small city, but its economic footprint in Greater Brighton is significant. It is home to an enterprising economy and highly qualified workforce, with 218 digital business start-ups in 2018 alone and more than 400,000 jobs in 40,000 businesses in the Greater Brighton area. 
    • There is a strong social and solidarity economy, made up of co-operatives, community housing groups, charities and third sector organisations. 
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    The Rich List reveals that we need wealth for all

    The spectacle of this year’s Sunday Times Rich List has revealed, yet again, that Britain’s richest are getting richer still. Published yesterday, the list shows that Britain’s 1,000 richest individuals and families are sitting on record wealth of £771.3bn, up £47.8bn in a year. The UK’s billionaire count has climbed to 151, up six on last year. The threshold at which the super-rich make the list has risen £5m to £120m.[1]

    In other news (from the same paper on the same day) we learn that an emergency food bank has been set up in the Whitehall offices of a government department, after cleaners and other support staff became the victims of a payroll blunder by one of Britain’s biggest outsourcing companies.[2] The human cost of this incident adds to the growing number of people in the UK who cannot afford basic needs such as food.[3]

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  • Food Poverty Action Plan for Greater Manchester

    15 Mar. 2019

    • Beyond the fringe: thinking seriously about wealth, power, and ownership

    A general rule of thumb with fringe events during party conference season is that unless you are serving warm food, you can rarely expect attendance figures to rise above thirty people. This figure might reduce if your event is too early in the morning, and further still if on the last day of conference. Therefore, the fact that almost one hundred party members, councillors, and activists attended our ‘Future of Public Services’ fringe at 9am on the last day of Labour Party conference (without a sandwich in sight) suggests that there is significant interest and traction on this agenda.

    The huge appetite for new ideas was palpable across the three days in Liverpool. On Wednesday morning, there was standing room only as CLES welcomed Shadow Chancellor, Rt Hon John McDonnell MP, Lisa Nandy MP, Jim McMahon MP, Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz OBE, and writer and broadcaster, Paul Mason to discuss how we must restore ‘public value’ to public services if we want to transform British society.

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  • GM Food Poverty Alliance Launched

    17 May. 2018
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