The Editor's Post: Furniture shuffling or transformative change? The UK’s new Office for the impact Economy

Much cheering greeted the announcement this week of a new Office for the Impact Economy to be situated at the heart of the UK government, and headed up by the PM’s chief secretary and right-hand man Darren Jones.

Yet, for those of us who have been around for a few years, it was hard to shake off that Groundhog Day feeling. Our founding editor, Tim West, who has a much sharper memory for the last 25 years of social enterprise-focused policy announcements than I do, pointed out that this celebration of the dawn of a new day for cross-cutting impact policy within government feels similar to when we woke up to the news of the Social Enterprise Unit (positioned within the Department for Trade and Industry under Tony Blair’s Labour government) in 2001 and, later, the Office for the Third Sector (2006) which became the Office for Civil Society (in the Cabinet Office) in 2008. 

Things drifted off course in 2016, when the then Conservative prime minister Theresa May moved the civil society minister Rob Wilson and most of the functions of the Office for Civil Society from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. This news was greeted with dismay at the time, and the responsibility for social enterprise has sat there, rather uncomfortably, ever since.

Overseas too, we have seen similar initiatives come and go including the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation in the US, under president Barack Obama. (Back in 2012, the head of that office, Jonathan Greenblatt, addressed an audience of social entrepreneurs and social investors at Pioneers Post’s Good Deals conference in London, pointing out that the US had been watching the UK’s leadership in social innovation.) We have reported several times on initiatives spearheaded by Malaysia’s Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (known as MaGIC) which was created in 2014. Today, social entrepreneurship still enjoys a central position in the Malaysian government under the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development and Cooperative, and, as we found at the Rural Social Enterprise Gathering last week, the movement is thriving.

Back in the UK, it’s undoubtedly good news that what is now being referred to by ministers as the ‘impact economy’ has a brand new home and attention from people in the highest ministerial positions. What’s more, many representatives of social enterprise and social investment movements from around the world are watching what is taking place here. 

However, it’s what happens next that will really count. As longstanding social entrepreneur Dominic Llewellyn told us: “Success will require sustained commitment — from ministers, officials and the impact economy alike — to make sure this Office realises its full potential rather than becoming another short-lived initiative.”

And, in Tim’s words: “This will determine whether this move will be transformative or just a case of moving around the furniture.”

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Top image: Darren Jones, chief secretary to the UK prime minister (credit: House of Commons, Flickr)