The Preston Model ten years on: Community Wealth Building is an unstoppable movement

It is precisely a decade ago I met Ted Howard during his first visit to Preston in the north of England for a lecture to our council and its partner organisations. At the time I was a relatively new member of the Labour Council executive led by the late Peter Rankin that gained control of the city the previous year. 

I was tasked with promoting social justice at a time of crippling austerity and a dearth of alternative thinking when it was needed most. My desire to develop a more democratic economy required researching how economic democracy could work in this country and beyond. 

Encountering Evergreen Cooperatives and the hundreds of new jobs in worker ownership in Cleveland, Ohio inspired every single person who attended Ted’s talk. We had learnt enough and Preston Labour formally adopted Community Wealth Building (CWB) in 2013 with the term then unheard of in our country. 

What became the Preston Model was conceived over several pints of beer with Council finance man Martyn Rawlinson, myself and Neil McInroy and Matt Jackson from Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) meeting on a cold winter evening in a Preston pub. At this infamous gathering, we became  accustomed with each other’s idiosyncrasies and shared a strong desire to try something new and radical. 

Since then, and despite some setbacks, Preston has moved forward with a whole place Community Wealth Building strategy with a dedicated Cabinet Member Freddie Bailey, council officers, and supportive partners working collaboratively to deliver change. We don’t seek to manage our local economy, we want to transform it.  

Early policies saw promotion of the real living wage, a new credit union, and work with anchor institutions rippled an additional tens of millions into Preston enterprise. We engaged the public pension fund we are part of to invest directly in our community and designed planning policies so local people and suppliers participate in major developments in the commercial as well as public economy. 

Whilst much of this is desirable and common sense, the Preston Model seeks fundamentally to democratise our local economy. A decade ago we abandoned failed corporate city centre development approaches based on part privatisation and began regenerating our city in local public ownership with Preston Markets, Preston Bus Station, and now Harris Museum and Art Gallery redeveloped with local vendors featuring heavily. 

Soon Preston will develop a £45m publicly owned cinema and leisure complex  'Animate' with trade union access in the construction and development phase. The vacant Amounderness House will be repurposed again in public ownership for local independents, and we are determined to develop new council owned housing for the first time in a generation.

Preston has insourced services back into the local authority and collaborated with anchor partners who did similar. A regional cooperative bank 'North West Mutual' will provide banking services with a target of close to £1 billion in lending when authorised. Six new worker cooperatives are registered including the UK’s first union coop 'Preston Cooperative Education Centre'. Other achievements include the first Community Land Trust in Central Lancashire and Leighton Street Cooperative owned and run by our local traveller community. 

In the longer term we will commission a study to deliver municipally owned broadband; target construction and retrofit sectors for worker ownership; seek opportunities for public, cooperative and community production of decarbonised energy; and accelerate work with anchors (most notably the local National Health Service (NHS)) to increase recruitment in our less well-off communities helping remove the disadvantage minority communities and women face in the labour market.

The Preston Model can be described as a jigsaw puzzle with each piece needed in place to complete the picture. Indicators so far are positive with real living wage jobs in Preston increasing from 76% to 88% from 2015 to 2022, the largest number of affordable housing starts in Lancashire, and reductions in child poverty in recent years. However, engaging communities to build support for these policies is essential. 

Back in 2018, I worked full time in a mundane Civil Service job finding it impossible to deal with the interest I was receiving about Community Wealth Building and what was happening in Preston. That year I was privileged to accept the role of Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative to promote Community Wealth Building at the same time I became Council Leader. I was liberated to begin this mission.

Since then I have delivered numerous events, visits, presentations and interviews with politicians, regional and local government, anchor institutions, voluntary sector bodies, think-tanks, trade unions, social economy organisations, academics, public health professionals and media outlets. Political support was warmly received from senior Labour politicians including John McDonnell and Ed Miliband. However, we have convinced many more in and outside the labour movement.   

Working alongside Democracy Collaborative colleagues there are now dozens of UK cities and regions adopting Community Wealth Building. Anchor networks have emerged most notably in Greater London with £73bn of collective spend supporting post Covid recovery. Our NHS proudly defines itself an ‘anchor institution’ in its long term plan. The Civic Universities Network with 100 members has done similar.  

Ownership Hubs promoting worker and employee ownership have been established in Sheffield, Greater Manchester and Greater London alongside the ‘1 Million Owners’ campaign. Networks of regional cooperative banks are emerging with a potential footprint of 17 million customers bringing more democracy to the financial sector. 

City regions have developed Land Commissions to expand Community Land Trusts and council housing is being developed in significant numbers especially in London. Insourcing is widespread in local government and municipalities are engaged in the direct delivery of renewable energy and decarbonisation. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is now the first trade union to adopt Community Wealth Building and is investigating worker ownership for postal services and broadband.

In devolved government the Welsh Assembly is delivering their own version of CWB known as the Foundational Economy, the Scottish Government has a new Minister for Community Wealth Building and is engaging its 32 councils to develop CWB plans following pioneering work in North Ayrshire, and Stormont aspires to deliver a North of Ireland CWB strategy following a recent commission involving Joe Guinan and Sarah McKinley.    

This lightening progress compliments work in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and existing practice in the US including Chicago, New York, Cleveland and Atlanta. In Europe, as well as Amsterdam and Barcelona, enquiries from France, Germany, Italy and Denmark have emerged with some traditional social democrats seeing Community Wealth Building as a vehicle to address their electoral decline. The movement is growing, not slowing.

Community Wealth Building offers an architecture for a democratic economy with international solidarity at a time wealth inequality, climate change and racial injustice demand systemic transformation and not skirting round the edges. We now have much of the infrastructure in place to move beyond capitalism and deliver truly fair and democratic societies. Let’s deliver that  future.

Matthew Brown is Senior Fellow for the promotion of Community Wealth Building in the UK with the Democracy Collaborative and Leader of Preston City Council