The Food Bank at Tesco in the Forest of Dean

There's something tragically ironic about a food back collection at Tesco given the current local debacle over siting a new Asda store in the Forest of Dean. 

Forest of Dean council leader Patrick Molyneux is reported as saying:

"We are disappointed as a council, but today's decision will not alter our determination to do the very best for Cinderford and the district."

The BBC article goes on to describe how the High Court ruling against Asda said that "the council did not make the reasons clear enough for originally approving an out-of-town development when its core strategy encouraged building in town centres,"

So why were the council so keen to shape local economic development in this way?

When I wrote last year to the Forest 'Review' I'd described how Walmart of which Asda is a subsiduary, takes an active stance against the payment of living wages and how this has the effect of increasing poverty in the communities where they create new stores.

It's no secret that many stores in Cinderford are struggling, with council car parking strategy creating an additional deterrent for people to use shops in the high street.  

The Asda store will no doubt increase council revenues and they too are under pressure to balance the books, but should this be done in such a way that the needs of local people are a secondary consideration , if any consideration at all?

As an economic development advocacy for business with a community purpose, we warned government in 2004, of the risks failing to tackle poverty  with a strategy to invest in stimulating local economies, which said:

"Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity.”

The council, like Tesco, appears to be practising a "trickle down" approach to economic development based on the assumption that an 'invisible hand' creates social benefit from self interest. Yet trickle down, as we've reasoned always fails to reach those who fall between the cracks - the people who must now depend on food banks.

"Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not."

As I learned from the question I raised in a council meeting in 2010, for the type of organisation we run, there is no policy for engaging us in the supply chain.

"The Council does not have a specific policy to offer support to social enterprises.  The financial support provided to the Forest of Dean Health & Social Care CIC resulted from a specific decision of the full Council - the history of which is included in our agenda papers at tonight's meeting."

They were referring to the case which raised sufficent concern about misuse of funds that it was almost referred to police. A cabal of local Tories who created an entity which never traded while allowing a former manager of Atos Healthcare to be rewarded hansomely.

At the beginning of this year, the Public Services (Social Value) act came into force, requiring local authorities to consider the additional social value of their procurement decisions. yet the Forest of Dean still has no specific policy.

I've put my cards on the table with business that re-invests to stimulate the local economy.  which arose from a meeting to discuss local broadband quality.  With EU funding to support a broadband task group, all community owned approaches were excluded, with BT recommended as sole provider. Notably the National Audit Office has recently endorsed criticisms of the lack of transparency in rural broadband procurement.          

That Patrick Molyneux appointed himself as head of this task group should come as no surprise, nor that it cost £165,000 in RDPE funding.