On October 27, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Minister for Communities, Dierdre Hargey, formally accepted a report from her independent Minister’s Advisory Panel on Community Wealth Building. The report details 26 recommendations to advance CWB and support sustainable economic change for Northern Ireland. Joe Guinan and Sarah McKinley sat on the panel. Below are Guinan’s remarks at the launch event contextualizing the report and explaining the recommendations therein.

Good afternoon, it’s a real pleasure to be with you all here in Belfast today. My name is Joe Guinan, and I’m Vice President for Strategy and Programs at The Democracy Collaborative, a U.S.-based think and do tank working on Community Wealth Building and the Democratic Economy.

I have the great honour of serving as one of the five members of the Minister’s Advisory Panel on Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland and I’ve been asked by fellow panel members to talk briefly about the recommendations in our independent report to the Minister, which we are releasing today.

Firstly, I want to thank Minister Hargey for her leadership in establishing this advisory panel and calling for these recommendations. There are a number of people to thank as part of this process, not least my fellow panel members, the officials at the Department for Communities, all those we spoke to, and the Secretariat who supported the panel’s work, including Trademark Belfast and DTNI.

But Minister Hargey has our special thanks because the panel and the report literally wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for her visionary leadership in calling them into being. So thank you, Deirdre, it’s been a real honour and I hope we have gone someway in providing what you were hoping for.

Let me also say a few words about context. In preparing our recommendations, the panel has felt the weight of the present moment. As you all know, and as we say in the report, this is a moment of great political and economic difficulty. We’re in an era of war and inflation and supply shocks. We are still emerging from the impacts of the pandemic only to find ourselves in an unprecedented cost of living crisis which threatens to ravage wages and living standards. Underlying that is the ongoing crisis of our economic model itself, which continues to generate deep inequality and all that flows from that, including underinvestment and low productivity and poorly paid jobs and struggling communities. And looming over it all is the growing threat that climate catastrophe already poses to the future of life on our planet.

We’re living in times in which permanent crisis, unfortunately, has become the new normal—and this calls for new efforts and leadership to address this crisis on all fronts in a way that can truly deliver better lives and a better future for all people in Northern Ireland.

So that was a starting point for much of what we recommend. The panel doesn’t see Community Wealth Building as an optional extra, a nice agenda to add to the already long list of things for government to do, but rather as a key means of collectively addressing this growing crisis with real solutions on the ground capable of rewiring the fundamentals of the economy, of who owns and controls wealth, in a way that could be truly game-changing and transform communities and people’s everyday lives.

In such a forbidding context, in which available resources are scarce but the need is growing exponentially, every public pound is going to have to do double or triple duty, and the calculus must change to one in which we better mobilize the role of the public sector in Northern Ireland as a stabiliser and anchor and catalyst for economic change, ensuring that public money stays and recirculates in local economies rather than being immediately extracted away.

Against all the bad news, the good news is that Community Wealth Building can be one of the major tools of government in Northern Ireland in responding to multiple and related challenges, making public money and interventions go further in underpinning the essentials of a more stable and equitable economy. It can help lessen the pressure on social security and health budgets, tackling problems in a more cost-effective manner by intervening way upstream to tackle the social determinants of health and poverty and to drive change in a way that reconfigures and repurposes the economy to meet real needs—of production and consumption—and changes ownership and outcomes.

A lot of things are said about Community Wealth Building as it is taken up in more and more places, but the version we are presenting you with here is the “full fat”, no-holds-barred version that seeks to do nothing less than lay the foundations for building a democratic economy for all. Speaking personally for a moment, I want to say that given all your assets and advantages and opportunities, Northern Ireland is positioned to be a global leader in tackling the major challenges of the day through Community Wealth Building approaches if only we can find the momentum and political will and leadership to advance them.

To turn to the recommendations of the report, the panel wishes to acknowledge, first, the full range of Community Wealth Building activities and actions already taking place in communities across Northern Ireland at different levels and scales. The major focus of the panel’s work has by necessity been on the appropriate role of government in Northern Ireland—specifically within the remit of the Department for Communities, but also importantly considering a whole- of-government approach—in supporting Community Wealth Building work in communities by partners on the ground. The report’s recommendations are therefore oriented towards necessary policy and legislative changes as well as enabling actions that government can take to help deliver transformative impact through Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland. Some of our recommendations are more detailed and specific, while others are broader and more aspirational, offering frameworks and bold directions necessitating the development of new strategies and lines of work.

The success of a truly transformational Community Wealth Building approach in Northern Ireland (and, therefore, the successful delivery of the recommendations presented in this report) will require deep partnership, consultation, and empowerment of and bottom-up activity in, and by, communities themselves. While government has a necessary and powerful role to play in delivering a Community Wealth Building agenda, for true long-term viability and impact, Community Wealth Building must be community-owned and-driven. The actions the panel is proposing should be viewed in that light.

There are too many recommendations in the report—26!—to go through them all individually, but we have grouped them around the five main pillars of Community Wealth Building activity plus additional recommendations on governance.

On plural ownership of the economy, we set out the need for a new social economy strategy; recommend the creation of a Community Wealth Building/Social Enterprise Fund; call for a review of realignment of existing levers to support the social economy, including through employee ownership conversions and buy outs; and urge the democratisation of public services and creation of Community Wealth Building hubs.

On locally rooted finance, we urge investigation of the possibility of a regional public investment bank in Northern Ireland as an intermediary for social and green lending; the establishment of a Community Wealth Building pilot fund; an audit of underutilised financial instruments to repurpose them for Community Wealth Building ends; changes in regulations to support credit unions doing more business lending in the real economy; support for Community Finance Ireland as a growing social lender; a rigorous feasibility study for a local mutual bank; and the adoption of more participatory budgeting practices.

On fair employment and just labour markets, we urge a break with decades of race to the bottom, calling for Northern Ireland to align with the direction of many near neighbours and peers in moving toward a statutory basis for collective bargaining, including sectoral bargaining; a statutory Real Living Wage; the spread of the Northern Ireland Executive’s Real Living Wage commitment to other public bodies through conditionalities in their public contracts; and a widespread deployment of the available levers of Government and public anchor institutions in support of fair pay and working conditions, among other measures. We also—and this is a big one—see the need for an overarching industrial strategy for Northern Ireland to create the needed well paid jobs in the sectors of the future, from care to tech to environmental goods and services.

On socially productive use of land and property, we call for a new Community Asset Transfer Delivery Framework based on comprehensive legislation to ensure effective and efficient community asset transfer across public bodies in Northern Ireland; the development of a capital and revenue-based funding programme to support asset transfer; development of a dedicated programme on Community-led Housing; and technical assistance and capacity building around skills across the public and community sectors.

On progressive commissioning, sourcing, and procurement of goods and services, we call for the creation of a Public Sector Transformation Academy for Northern Ireland; development of a robust system for the consistent recording, monitoring, and policing of social value outcomes; greater use of social partnerships; and the introduction of a Social Value Act and/or direct changes to procurement guidance.

Finally, to support the successful delivery of the strategic recommendations in this report, there must be a clearly articulated, empowered, and accessible “home for Community Wealth Building” within the Northern Ireland Executive. This likely requires a purposely-created unit within government with access to the necessary financial, economic, and social levers across departments and agencies that would provide the enabling architecture and infrastructure to support, embed, and grow Community Wealth Building action over the long-term.

While we believe this unit should reside within the Department for Communities, it is critical that it take a cross-departmental and whole-of-government approach to link policy and public resources directly to Community Wealth Building practice on the ground.

Taken as a whole, we believe that our recommendations represent a practical set of actions that the Executive, alongside partners in local government and the social and civic sectors, can take to help secure an equitable future for Northern Ireland’s residents, where the region’s considerable wealth is broadly held and recirculated for the benefit of people, place, and planet for generations to come.

With this report, the independent Minister’s Advisory Panel has completed its work, and we hand it over to you, Minister Hargey. We know we’ve created a lot of work to do, but we stand ready to continue to advise and consult on the roll-out of any of these recommendations.

And on behalf of the whole panel we once again commend you and thank you for your leadership.