Empty shops, culture and coffee

According to the Local Data Company, Blackpool is second in another highly prestigious league table. The who's got the emptiest shops premier league, just behind Derby. They pipped us to the title by 0.08% (21.8% to 21%.) But there's not much Blackpool Council can do though is there? 

Yes actually they could do alot. I could give them ten ideas a day for bringing shops back to life for peanuts. In fact I already have given them one at a high level. An idea involving young people, employment opportunities, other funders and it isn't a poundshop. You might even call it cultural... taking Blackpool away from it's low rent crappy drunk tripper image. I spoke for months to people at the council but despite them all genuinely meaning well I got nowhere. I got the impression they didn't understand what a social enterprise and council partnership on such things could achieve. Frustratingly, this was a council owned building which still sits empty after 2 or more years.  

I put alot of my spare time (I work for a living elsewhere) into trying to secure this shop. I emailed, had meetings, walked round it, spoke on the phone with lots of different people and in the end. Nothing. Part of the purpose of this blog is to open a debate again with these people and to get them to really talk to social entrepreneurs. 

I will come to the Southpoint facility proposed for the Palatine Campus over the coming weeks but there's a great deal of money going to be spent by a council with a poor record on building sustainable developments. Yet they don't really engage with social enterprises properly. Sure you can go to the meetings and consult. You can spend hours wading through the reports they write but this IS NOT how you create sustainability and get Blackpool out of the basket-case culture that pervades. Councils don't DO business. They can't. That is not a criticism but it is a fact. Sadly they think they can which leaves us the council tax payers often with a large bill, a white elephant then some nice new shiney council offices. 

Stanley Park Cafe is another one. I contact the person responsible to suggest SPACE takes it over once the court case with the ex tenants is done and get fobbed off... again in this blog I will detail any progress I make on that too. At the moment I understand the council are running it. But what are their plans? Is it worth putting the effort in trying to negotiate a lease to find they think they can run it better?

If you're interested in any of these ramblings then get in touch with me please as it may be you are the councillor, officer or bigwig I need to get this stuff happening now. 


There are people in the public sector in Blackpool who are getting it and I want to encourage them to work with me and others to make Blackpool not the bullshit Social Enterprise town but the REAL one. Blackpool's history is full of entrepreneurial spirit and that is still there if the right conditions are in place. So come on Blackpool Council pull yer finger out! 

SocEntBlog 

SWINES, FLU AND WHY I START A BLOG NOW...

So I feel ill again and despite 18 hours of kip in the last 24 am still tired... I am never usually ill so this is very dull... However the social enterprise must go on so I have been down and checked the place out after last night's musical meanderings and paid some much needed funds into the hungry bank account.

This blog is a kind of a record (albeit late in the day) of me running a social enterprise in the UK. I  opened in January 2007 a set of rehearsal rooms for young musicians to play, learn and record their own music in a safe and secure environment. I did this after my 14 year old got locked in above a pub while rehearsing (God knows what would have happened if there had been a fire), I also went to look at a place which had cannabis growing in one of the rooms and no toilet. (This was more depressing because it was funded by the council indirectly!!)

So we have made a place for young people to begin a process where they make websites, design logos and flyers, set up gigs and generally learn a ton of skills. I borrowed £25,000 on my mortgage and off we went. I knew we could easily break even but genuinely expected that the youth services at the council would welcome me into their fold as (to them) a totally free addition to their pathetic offering of stuff to do for young people. But no. It seems young people having nothing to do is something they are prepared to “talk” about and to “theorise” upon and do multiple expensive “reports” on but not actually do anything to change.

The youth service in this town is in a mess. The people that run it are very decent people but they work within a system that stops them changing anything. They are risk and enterprise averse and genuinely just do not get what we have done here. They have youth workers who in my experience have not got a bloody clue what they are doing. They work 9 til 5 Monday to Friday... just when young people don't need their services which again is utterly staggering. I have tried to get a meeting now with my “area person” for the last 6 months and in between a wedge of holidays, mulitiple cancellations and now sickness absolutely nothing has happened.

We employ 7 young people who all learn what the real world of work is about and that is the key here. Setting up social enterprises (real ones) creates jobs and income for the town and gives much needed paid work to a group who find it hard to get.

I don't want this to be a rant although it could easily become that because despite setting up the only safe under 18 nights this town has ever seen I got no support from the council and have now had to stop them for lack of a venue in town. (Not because they weren't well attended.)

I will add more flesh to the bones of this soon but how a town with such potential amongst its young people can have a council that does so little for them really makes me very angry. Up to now I have voiced my anger in a quiet non public way. That strategy has failed so now I have to change my direction and start saying things they just won't like. Short of them trying to shut me down what have I or the hundreds of young people that use us got to lose by being compliant?

Socent Blog Numero Uno

OMFG - A tory leader that is interesting!

See that link above? That's Peter Oborne talking with David Cameron on BBC Radio 4... now without telling you my political history etc... for me to be excited by a conversation a Conservative leader has with a Daily Mail writer is a bit unusual to say the least. But if you care to listen to it, you hear all the things us social enterprises are meant to be about. Changing society from the bottom up... empowering people at a local level not throwing out edicts from ivory towers driven by grants from faceless quangos.

I want to see change at a local level where currently I have to fight with money wasting time servers waiting for their fat, future crippling pensions just to keep doing what I do. They don't help they hinder. I want to see the young people I work with have a stake in something and I want that something to be a business that makes money and has a good future... a social enterprise. Not bucket shaking begging bowl operations run by ex public sector failures. I live in a town that is way up there in all the bad statistics yet despite the millions being spent by the council and quangos on the ground it feels like nothing's changed.

It doesn't change because the local and national governments just don't see the opportunities for change and for social enterprise. They can't do the bottom up thing because they're at the top. Nationally and locally the decision makers aren't part of the society they claim to be trying to fix. It is just not worth trying to get them to change. It just needs re-building from the bottom up. That is what social enterprise will do.

Yes we can. (Sorry) And we will.



SOCENTBLOG