The Editor's Post: When will the UK government take social enterprises seriously?
The answer is staring them in the face, but the Labour government still doesn't seem to recognise social enterprise as a solution to delivering its promises – and stick to the same old debates intead. This week's view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.
Social enterprises in the UK are still not taken seriously as an economic force by the government, and it’s driving Lord Victor Adebowale mad.
That is what he told me this week, as I sat down with him for an interview on the sidelines of the Labour party conference in Liverpool. The chair of Social Enterprise UK, Adebowale is one of the most respected figures in the social enterprise sector; as a crossbench peer, one of his roles is to scrutinise government, and he is not hiding his frustration.
It’s easy to understand why. As an example, just before we talked, Adebowale was taking part in a panel discussion about improving public service delivery, alongside commentators and politicians. The debate was based on a simplistic binary assumption: that public services are either delivered by the state, or contracted out to private companies that only care about financial returns.
Commentator Sam Freedman warned against the “shadow state” of extractive private businesses delivering services with little consideration for the public good. Until Adebowale spoke, there seemed to be no awareness of a different kind of private businesses: the social enterprises, rooted in their communities and acting with purpose as a guide, which can support a cash-strapped state to deliver essential services – for the greater good, not for the greater profit.
“The answer is staring them in the face,” says Adebowale. But the government – in dire need for new ideas, as the old ones clearly don’t work – seems to be scared of innovation and sticks to the same old debates.
Reaching underserved social entrepreneurs
Last week, we published the news that a new £5m sharia-compliant social investment fund was being launched in Bradford, UK. Since then, the engagement with the story has been remarkable – both on social media and on our website. It quickly became our most-read article for the past few weeks, and the numbers show it: it has reached a community well beyond our usual readership. While the project is on a regional scale, calls for it to be replicated across the UK multiplied, as people realised that structuring loans that work for those Muslim social entrepreneurs that follow sharia law was not only possible, but already happening, as the fund had already made its first investment.
The news clearly resonated, and I think this is actually the first step for this fund to achieve its purpose: to reach social entrepreneurs in underserved communities, you first need to inform them that solutions are there for them. At Pioneers Post, this is exactly why we’re here: to equip social entrepreneurs and investors with the information and knowledge they need to accomplish their mission of tackling the hardest challenges our world is facing, and it’s heartwarming to see when this is starting to happen.
This week's top stories:
‘I don’t believe in the social economy, I believe in one economy’ – Lord Adebowale
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The Impact World this Week: 3 October 2025
Top image: UK prime minister Keir Starmer speaks at the Civil Society Summit in July 2025. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
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