Member Article

Social enterprises are key to growth

Affordable housing contractor, Wates Living Space, has made a renewed call for businesses to increase investment in the social enterprise (SE) sector - as the number of registered SEs climbs to 500 across Birmingham*.

The call to action follows the Wates Group’s launch of a new social value toolkit that aims to equip housing professionals with a means to embed social value within their organisations and at the heart of their communities.

‘Communities Count: A practical guide to unlocking social value’** promotes continued investment in social enterprises as an integral part of social and economic development, leading to cost savings, improved services, stronger partnerships, increased employment and clarity of purpose, across the housing sector and beyond.

Having pledged to trade £20m nationally with the SE sector by 2020, the Wates Group’s continued drive to mobilise investment in this sector also recently saw the contractor host a ‘Seeing is Believing’ tour of Birmingham’s Social Enterprise Quarter in Digbeth.

The event, jointly hosted with Birmingham-based social enterprise development organisation, iSE, gave attendees the opportunity to observe a variety of social enterprises in action.

Stewart Reid, Business Director, Wates Living Space, commented: “Birmingham has one of the highest concentrations of social enterprises in the UK, employing approximately 14,600 people across the city. More impressively, there are over 50 registered social enterprises in Digbeth alone, all working for the sole purpose of overcoming economic and social challenges. Our recent ‘Seeing is Believing’ event was a powerful forum to demonstrate their successes in action and to celebrate the strong growth of the city’s social enterprise sector.

“Wates is proud to have traded over £5m with SEs across the UK to date. Our most recent appointment was Birmingham-based Argonaut Community Enterprise, which employs deaf and disabled people – an appointment that I’m very proud to say is enabling Argonaut to increase sustainable employment opportunities for local people.

“Ultimately, social enterprises are the cornerstone to local economic growth and regeneration. As such we firmly believe that making them an integral part of our supply chain is a sure fire way to inject capital directly into the economy and we urge our industry peers to join us in this effort.”

The Wates Group was recently highly commended in the Enterprise Growth category at Business in the Community’s (BiTC) 2012 Annual Responsible Business Gala Dinner in recognition of the Group’s investment in and mentoring for the Social Enterprise sector.

*As reported by Birmingham and Solihull Social Economy Consortium, bssec.org.uk

**This is available to download from the Wates Group’s and its partners’ websites.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Wates .