A Marshall Plan for Civic Life
There is a growing movement for civic renewal, with broad political support. But one question remains unanswered: how do we fund this work at the scale required?
This post was co-authored with Polly Curtis, Chief Executive of Demos.
Announcing a landmark programme of research and deliberation to develop a funding settlement for civic renewal.
This is a time of division and fractures, both between political parties and within them. Yet there is a growing consensus that national renewal in Britain cannot happen without a revitalisation of civic life. This argument has been made in various strengths and flavours by the leaders of all five parties in Britain’s newly fragmented political landscape, and by all of Labour’s leadership contenders.
We do not get a consensus like this unless people are pulled there by deep tides of history and evidence. In a recent report, Kinship Works documented the many reasons that investment in community life is now so urgent. They include two decades of literature showing the depletion of civic capacity and social capital, and growing evidence of the costs of this decline: the pressure it piles on public services, the way it stokes a febrile politics, and the direct impact on our mental and physical health from isolation and loneliness. There is also an increasingly strong evidence base showing that when a nation’s communities are depleted, so is its economy.
The movement for civic renewal has not only gained momentum because it is needed, but also because we are now much clearer what the work entails. In the last few years, we have seen the emergence of a communitarian statecraft — a way to use the power of the state and public institutions to foster thriving communities. Thanks to 15 years plus of pioneering practice, and programmes like Power to Change and Big Local, we know how to do this work well, and we also know how the state needs to show up in order to support it.
The communitarian statecraft liberates us from the technocratic view of government that has long-dominated politics, especially on the Left. This is the idea that government can only make our lives better by acting as a machine that solves problems, doing things to us and for us: regulating, making policies, designing ‘interventions’, and delivering services. It also gets us beyond the Conservative agenda of the Big Society, which was right in its aspiration to grow society but wrong in its view that the only way to do this is to shrink the state.
Despite the growing consensus, however, one big question remains unanswered: if we need a decade-long, national effort to revitalise civic life, how should we fund it?
The decline of civic life in Britain runs long and deep, and it will not be reversed by one programme, or even by the combination of the current government’s meaningful efforts, from Pride in Place to the idea of building a ‘neighbourhood health service’. To move the dial, we need to invest large sums, year after year after year. We also know that, today, even the best civic work lives a precarious existence, surviving on scraps of funding, living forever on the edge of closure. So this is about the security of funding as well as its scale.
Beyond this, there are questions of resilience. In an unstable world, decentralised funding for civic renewal might be safer than top-down methods, like tax and spend, that could be reversed with the swipe of a pen. And there are questions, too, of behaviour, and the incentives and cultures that can be created — for good and bad — by the way money flows. Can we fund civic work in a way that in itself strengthens communities? For example, are there financial tools that give people true ownership, and a felt sense of ownership, over work to revive their local communities, or that amplify the pride and belonging we each feel towards the places in which we live?
To answer these questions, Kinship Works and Demos are launching a landmark programme of research and deliberation: the Marshall Plan for Civic Life. The work starts with seed-funding from This Day and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, but this is the beginning; we want to build a broad coalition, with other partners, funders, and collaborators.
We want to shape and adapt the work together, but here is a word on scope and the questions and opportunities we are currently exploring.
Scope and areas to explore
The Marshall Plan will focus on direct efforts to rehabilitate civic and community life. This includes re-activating civic agency and investing in civic infrastructure — from physical civic spaces, to the relational infrastructure of community governance. It also includes the clubs, associations, and volunteer networks that act as the capillaries through which civic life flows. We are not focused on the wider and important question of how civil society as a whole is funded. For example, direct funding for service delivery by charities is out of scope, although we are interested in related questions, such as the way procurement can be used to build community capacity.
Given the scale of the challenge, we want to start with a broad canvas, so in the coming weeks we will publish a Discussion Paper offering an initial sketch of the waterfront of possible financing mechanisms. The paper will explore promising mechanisms used internationally and throughout the history of the civic sphere in Britain.
Here is a flavour of the approaches we are interested in:
Hypothecated business levies. Brazil has financed civic infrastructure for decades through levies on big employers. Could Britain do the same? Could there be a role for levies, based on a principle of polluter pays, learning from how we pay for regulators? Or could we deploy a ‘use it or lose it’ levy, like the UK’s Apprenticeship Levy, to encourage businesses to invest in the communities where they are based?
Collective place-based funding. In Britain we already invest in local infrastructure via developer contributions, and much of this money goes unspent. Could this or a similar mechanism be used to repair and maintain vital civic infrastructure? Or could a mechanism like Business Improvement Districts — a way for local businesses to agree and then mandate investment in shared local priorities — be adapted to agree investment in community priorities?
Public funding via general taxation. There is a long history of investment in communities by the state, from the New Deal for Communities to the current Pride in Place programme. Often these programmes have been accused of being too top down, something Pride in Place is now grappling with. What role should direct state funding play in the mix, what are the downsides, and what mechanisms — e.g. spin-outs, endowments — could safeguard true community ownership?
Community shares and crowdfunding. Over the last decade we have seen significant innovation in methods for communities to fund civic work for themselves, not just raising money but fostering pride and ownership. Over £210m has been raised through Community Share Issues and far more through crowdfunding platforms. Could more be done to support these mechanisms, such as by repeating or expanding previous government match-funding?
Memberships and subscriptions. Britain has a rich history of membership associations — friendly societies, working men’s and women’s clubs, trades unions — and civic institutions like the National Trust. Some friendly societies, like the Manchester-based Oddfellows, still survive. What could be done to revive or amplify these traditions?
Foundation philanthropy. In the last decade there has been decisive investment in civic renewal by foundations. Today, the UK’s top ten endowments hold over £55 billion in assets and major foundations spend billions every year. Could the UK’s largest endowments come together to commit to a decade of joint investment? Could models like Pando Funds be used to invest into the underlying root systems of civic life? Can we design such funding to be long-term or even self-sustaining, so that it helps to mature the field of civic renewal, and builds sustainable community wealth?
Private philanthropy and individual giving. Throughout the history of civic life, rich individuals like Andrew Carnegie played a formative role, funding libraries or gifting space for public parks. Could today’s ultra-High Net Worth individuals leave an equivalent legacy? What could be done to encourage this? And are there ways we could encourage a share of baby boomer inheritance to be channelled into the commons?
Procurement and anchor institutions. One third of UK public spending — £400 billion — flows through procurement. Could we redirect even a fraction of this spend to local suppliers? Should this become a norm for anchor institutions like hospitals and universities; buying from, investing in, and hiring from, the communities in which they are based?
Tax reliefs. Britain forgoes nearly £7 billion a year in tax revenue from reliefs on charities, but payroll giving is barely used; three-quarters of eligible employers don’t even offer it. Could a redesigned scheme unlock billions more? Would tax relief and payroll giving work better, and be more culturally resonant, if they were linked to the places people live and work?
Impact investment. UK impact investment has grown 13-fold since 2011, but over half of this investment flows into housing. Could other products and models unlock more funding for civic activities, and for place-based social entrepreneurs? Could we make more use of place-based social investment funds? Could major assets like local government pension funds be tilted towards place-based investment and community wealth-building?
For each of these mechanisms, we will undertake financial modelling to understand how much they could viably contribute. But we will also go beyond modelling to explore the wider qualities these mechanisms could support. We are particularly interested in:
Behavioural and cultural effects. Britain’s civic history is full of institutions that were powerful in part because of their funding models: the voluntarist networks of friendly societies, the movement of working men’s clubs, modern treasures like the National Trust, and models like coops. At their best, these institutions became vehicles for collective agency because they combined their funding model with membership. We will explore the potential to significantly expand these models.
Resilience. In an unstable world, we need to consider the stability of any funding settlement. Indeed, resilience and adaptability is one reason civic capacity is valuable, and worth rebuilding. It is not a coincidence that some of the most robust responses to crises like the Covid pandemic were highly distributed, and led by communities. There is also growing recognition of the importance of a strong civic life to national security, civic preparedness, and disaster recovery. These qualities will be undermined if we fund civic renewal in ways that could be wiped out by a single decision in Whitehall, or a bad year in the markets. We therefore want to explore how resilient the various funding mechanisms would be to social, political, and economic shocks. As one aspect of this, we will explore the value of building community wealth.
The goal ultimately is to develop a series of funding mechanisms that, together, could support a new social contract between people, government, civic actors, and wealth-holders.
Architecture and philosophy
Beyond funding mechanisms, we want to push the analogy with the original Marshall Plan further. The Marshall Plan worked not just because it solved the mathematical challenge of finding enough money to rebuild Europe after WWII. It also provided a philosophy and an architecture for that funding; a way to show why the investment would pay off handsomely to its funder, the US government, as it later did.
We will explore what an overall funding architecture for civic life, equivalent to the Marshall Plan, could look like — curating and building on the best evidence to date to describe a rationale, philosophy, and framework for investing in civic renewal. The framework is not just a practical structure for funding, but an underpinning logic about how all actors — state, citizens, private sector and civil society — can collaborate on national renewal. It is the foundation for a new deal — a way for the system to come together to rebuild civic life in Britain, from the ground up.
We see these as questions that sit above political parties. What we are describing is, in our view, an essential aspect of any stable and thriving social settlement, whoever is in government.
We hope the Marshall Plan will be a timely and valuable initiative, at a time of high stakes for democracy in Britain and around the world. We are committed to building the coalition for this agenda and would love to speak to potential partners — either keystone supporters of the work, or of specific modules. If you would like to find out more, get involved, or join the project as a partner, please drop us a line. We would also welcome feedback on our plans.
You can read more here about the Marshall Plan and get in touch. Or stay in touch with Kinship Works (LinkedIn, Blue Sky ) and Demos (LinkedIn, BlueSky).