Who owns
the town?
The money arrives, circles briefly, and leaves.
High street vacancy rates have risen from 3.7% in 2015 to 5.2% in 2023, with some towns far exceeding that figure. The standard response — attracting inward investment, subsidising chain retailers, funding regeneration programmes — has not worked. The money arrives, circles briefly, and leaves.
This is not a failure of policy design. It is a failure of ownership structure. Regeneration money directed at assets owned by external actors leaves the community when the programme ends, because the owners have no structural reason to keep it there.
The UK has 2.725 million registered businesses. The public sector spends £400 billion on procurement annually, most of it bypassing local suppliers. The infrastructure question is not whether the businesses exist. It is whether they are structured to capture and retain value locally.
The evidence is not theoretical.
It is documented, measured, and still standing.
“They started with a few shillings each and a room on Toad Lane. The principles they worked out in that room now govern three million cooperatives employing two hundred and eighty million people.” — on the Rochdale Pioneers, 1844
Everything we have documented traces back to a single philosophical decision made by one man in a newspaper article.
On 13 September 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times Magazine. Its thesis: a company has no social responsibility to the public or to society. Its only responsibility is to its shareholders.
Paying workers more became irresponsible. Building community infrastructure became a misuse of shareholder funds. Investing in training, housing, schools, and the long-term capability of a workforce became, in Friedman's language, a form of fraud against the people who owned the company.
It spread not because it was obviously true, but because it was extraordinarily convenient for the people who already controlled capital. It gave them an intellectual framework that turned their self-interest into a moral obligation.
George Cadbury's village at Bournville, Jeremiah Colman's schools in Norwich, Arizmendiarrieta's university in the Basque Country: all of it, by the Friedman doctrine, was wrong.
From 1948 to 1979, productivity and wages moved together. Workers got roughly what they produced. From 1979 to 2018, under shareholder primacy, productivity rose 70% — and worker pay rose 11.6%.
Extractive versus generative.
Not a difference of values — a difference of structure.
| Extractive model | Generative model | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Shareholders in distant cities hold control | Workers and users hold democratic governance rights |
| Profit | Returns flow to distant shareholders | Returns flow back into the cooperative and the community |
| Code | Proprietary, fenced off, can be acquired and redirected | Open source commons that cannot be enclosed |
| Crisis | Investors demand layoffs to protect capital | Worker-owners share hours rather than losing colleagues |
| Growth | Scale until acquisition, then relocate for efficiency | Stay small enough to know people's names |
| Legacy | Acquired and moved to Burton upon Trent in 18 months | Embedded in community across generations |
No new money. No inward investment.
Just money that stopped leaving.
Preston Council mapped where anchor institution spending was going. £750 million annually — only 5% to Preston suppliers, 39% to Lancashire. The council redirected procurement inward. No new money was required. The resources were already there. They had simply been leaking out.
By 2017, local procurement had risen to 18% within Preston, and to 79% across Lancashire. Unemployment fell from 6.5% to 3.1%. Preston was named the most improved city in the UK's Good Growth for Cities index. The model has since been adopted by dozens of local authorities across Britain.
The five foundations
Synthesised from 180 years of documented practice. Not a universal prescription — every town has different anchor institutions — but the structural principles are consistent.
Map before you build
Which anchors operate here? Where does spending go? Which owners are retiring without a plan? Preston began with a spreadsheet.
Anchor the strategy
NHS trusts, housing associations, councils. Even a 20% local procurement commitment creates enough demand to support cooperative suppliers.
Convert and create
Convert existing businesses via Employee Ownership Trusts. Create new cooperatives to fill supply-chain gaps. Do both simultaneously.
Lock ownership in place
Worker coops, CICs, Community Land Trusts, EOTs. The Colman's lesson: the moment ownership permits acquisition, the enterprise becomes extractive.
Build the infrastructure
Individual cooperatives are fragile. Networks of them are not. Cooperative banks, shared back-office, political champions, patient capital.
The Rochdale Pioneers started with twenty-eight people and a rented room.
None of them started with significant capital.
Redirect the pound.
- Commission a procurement mapping exercise.
- Set a local-sourcing target with a date.
- Identify three categories: catering, cleaning, IT support.
- Partner with a cooperative development agency.
- Make the first contract. Document the result.
Convert, don't close.
- If you're near retirement, look at Employee Ownership Trusts.
- If competing with chains, find two peers. Form a purchasing coop.
- If anchors need your skill, form a worker cooperative to supply it.
- Join a local independent business network.
Choose the structure first.
- Pick the ownership structure before the product.
- Open source everything non-essential to the commercial edge.
- Accept only capped-return capital.
- Build for local anchors first.
- Plan the Exit to Community before you begin.
Spend like it matters.
- Shop locally as a practice, not a habit of convenience.
- Learn the UK cooperative structures. Know which fits.
- Find the people who already understand this — they exist.
- Talk about ownership. It's the variable nobody discusses.
The knowledge exists. The legal structures exist. The examples exist. The evidence exists.
The only thing that remains is the decision to do it.