What community ownership in place can't do alone

This is another piece in our series of posts looking at research and evaluation published by others and applying that to our taxonomy and thinking. We are aiming to show where the evidence quality is across the field, and that these individual studies and interventions are part of a larger place-based field.

Locality and Power to Change published a really useful piece of research last week for those of us interested in place in general and community ownership particular: Keys to the Future: How We Build a New Era of Community Ownership. It should be read as evidence for place-based work as well as advocacy.

It frames some important numbers in the context of community ownership. The Community Ownership Fund closed having received roughly 3,800 eligible expressions of interest worth £1.8bn against a £150m pot, more than twelve times oversubscribed. The government’s replacement, the £61m Community Right to Buy Fund announced in June, covers a fraction of even that backlog, before the Community Right to Buy itself starts generating new demand: the report’s own conservative modelling puts likely additional applications at nine times the new fund’s capacity. A directory analysis of 80 active UK funders finds roughly £271m a year available across the whole fragmented landscape (grants, blended finance, energy-focused funds, heritage funders, regional trusts) none of it coordinated, most of it small, and little of it reaching the most deprived places, since equity was never a design principle of the original fund.

That last point is clearly addressed in the report: without deliberate targeting, community ownership risks accruing to places that already have the organisational capacity and social capital to compete for grants, deepening exactly the kind of “double disadvantage” it’s meant to relieve. This is consistent with what we’ve found tracking the field of place-based practice more broadly and the evidence for ownerships. Locality’s own data shows roughly 350 buildings transferring into community ownership in England each year against around 4,000 public buildings sold into private ownership, with extraction outpacing retention more than eleven to one. Plunkett UK’s most recent figures put the trading community-owned business sector at 869 enterprises with a 98% five-year survival rate once they reach trading status; Power to Change puts the wider English community business sector at around 11,300 organisations, £970m of annual income, and a genuine local economic multiplier: 56p of every £1 spent stays in the local economy against 40p for large private firms.

Naming the constraint

We’ve argued elsewhere, in Eight Provocations for Designing and Funding Place-Based Change, that the conditions shaping a place can sit in different states, and that getting the diagnosis wrong leads to the wrong intervention even when the underlying analysis of the place is otherwise sound. Two of those states are easy to confuse and are separated explicitly here, because I’m then going to build from that around community ownership.

A condition is latent when capacity exists but hasn’t been activated: connections held within groups but not across them, leadership present but unnetworked, assets sitting unused. The work that fits a latent condition releases what’s already there: convening, brokering, weaving. The risk for investing in place is building new infrastructure on top of capacity that already exists and just needed connecting.

A condition is constrained when something is actively blocking it: an identifiable actor, a discriminatory practice, a regulatory arrangement, a funding design. The test we’ve used is whether you can name the specific agent whose behaviour, if changed, would release the capacity. If you can, the first move is to challenge or remove the constraint. It’s not to build more capacity on top of it, because capacity-building doesn’t touch the thing doing the blocking.

Read against that test, the Keys to the Future evidence is a clean description of a constrained system. Communities that reach trading status mostly succeed: a 98% five-year survival rate is not a capability problem. Twelve-times oversubscription is not a demand-generation problem; the demand already exists and is already organised enough to apply. What’s missing (and those working is this field know this all too well) is capital access, on terms that can compete with commercial buyers who consistently outbid community bids on transferred assets, inside a funding design (the size of the CRTBF, its short spending deadlines, the absence of an equity design principle in the original COF) that we can name specifically. This is a constrained condition, not a latent one, and the report itself is implicitly diagnosing it that way: its recommendations are almost entirely about removing named constraints (bigger, better-coordinated, longer-term, more patient capital) rather than about building more local capacity to apply for a pot that’s already twelve times oversubscribed.

This is exactly where Tom Chance of the Community Land Trust Network’s response, published the same day, becomes useful rather than simply critical. His piece, A new era of community ownership, doesn’t dispute the report’s evidence. It disputes the level at which the constraint is being named.

Chance points to Gloucester Services, a motorway service station on the M5 developed as a partnership between a community trust and Westmorland: up to 3p of every £1 of non-fuel spend goes to the local trust, and over £4m has flowed into a community since it opened. He reads it as a working prototype for what the Local Power Plan is now trying to do deliberately: co-ownership models letting community organisations become partners in large-scale energy projects led by the private sector and Great British Energy, with government consulting on making this mandatory for private-sector schemes. He points to Power to Change’s CORE initiative, which used purpose-built financial and delivery intermediaries to acquire six solar farms into community ownership at a pace no community group could manage alone. He points to Scotland’s Community Wealth Building Act 2026, which requires public bodies to use their spending power and assets to promote community ownership as a matter of course, and to National Planning Framework 4, which gives positive planning weight to developments that result in community ownership. Set against a state or private developer’s discretion at that scale, he calculates the Locality/Power to Change ask (roughly £1bn of blended capital over five years) at somewhere around 0.01% of English GVA. His verdict: a strategy for niche growth, not national renewal.

We don’t think that’s a fair reading of what Keys to the Future is. It’s a fund-design prospectus, answering “how do we reboot the Community Ownership Fund well,” and it answers that question rigorously. But it is a fair account of what the report isn’t, and Chance’s underlying instinct is exactly right: the constraint he’s naming sits at a different level of the system than a grant fund, however well designed, can reach. Applying our own diagnostic test to his argument: can you name the specific agent whose behaviour, if changed, would release this capacity at the scale he’s describing? Yes, we probably can. The Department for Transport’s service station licensing regime, Homes England’s investment criteria, water company land management defaults, the terms on which Great British Energy structures private-sector partnerships. Those are nameable, addressable constraints, just not ones that operate at the scale of an individual place, or that a community ownership fund was ever designed to touch. This same issue came up on a recent piece about Blaenau.

Why this isn’t a choice between scales

If you follow the logic of what I’ve just written, then it’s tempting to read Chance’s critique as “local ownership is small-scale, structural mandate is the real lever” and stop there. We don’t think that’s right either, because the same diagnostic logic that supports his critique also limits it.

Constrained conditions require naming and removing the specific blocking agent, but only once the underlying capacity the constraint is blocking actually exists. Baking in co-ownership without patient investment in local relational and organisational capacity risks producing what our framework calls a captured condition: a governance structure that is nominally community-owned but, on examination, serves whoever already has the capacity to show up and run it (commissioners, developers, an unaccountable founding group) rather than the community whose name it carries. Capture is the hardest state to diagnose precisely because the structure looks like it’s working. A mandated community equity stake in a service station or a solar farm is not self-executing; someone locally still has to hold the governance, understand the finances, and be accountable to residents for how the money gets spent, and that capacity is built the slow way, not conjured by a licensing condition. We’re back to our risk of deepening the double-disadvantage.

The honest position is not that Chance is right and the report’s ambition is wrong, or the reverse. It’s that they’re answering different diagnostic questions, at different scales, and place-based work generally needs both answered.

The call to action

We made this argument in the final provocation of Eight Provocations, about how funders and policy makers should support the conditions of a place. We set out four broad approaches (investing in local activity without a place-based frame, building a programme, picking specific places for sustained relationship, or funding the underlying conditions directly) and argued that funding conditions directly was the most defensible position for anyone serious about durable change, precisely because, unlike the other three, it can operate at multiple scales simultaneously: local grants, regional infrastructure, and national policy advocacy, held together rather than treated as alternatives.

That is the call to action this debate should produce. Not “fund community ownership harder” and not “mandate co-ownership nationally instead” but an explicit commitment, from funders, from Locality and Power to Change as they take this work forward, and from government as it designs the Local Power Plan’s co-ownership provisions, to work at the level the constraint actually sits at, and to say so. Where the constraint is a community’s organisational and relational capacity to run an asset well, the right investment is patient, local, and measured in years. Where the constraint is a funding design, a licensing regime, or a set of investment criteria that determines whether ownership defaults to extraction or retention before any community has had the chance to organise, the right intervention is structural, and no amount of additional grant funding at the local level will substitute for it. Conflating the two is how well-evidenced, well-intentioned work ends up twelve times oversubscribed, or captured, or both.

The task in front of funders and policy makers isn’t to pick a scale: I really believe that scale is too often a red-herring in good place-based work and the work is always about the right pattern of practice. It is our collective task to get better at diagnosing, honestly and separately, which conditions in this system are latent, which are constrained, and which are at risk of capture and then to be willing to act at whatever level that diagnosis points to, even when the answer is inconvenient.