If Andy Burnham is serious about changing the British economy, Community Wealth Building is the way to do it
This week, Renewal are publishing a series of reflections on the direction that Andy Burnham's new government could or should take. In this piece, Preston City Council Leader Matthew Brown and political philosopher Martin O'Neill make the case for Community Wealth Building.
Introduction: Andy Burnham’s economic vision – how to turn rhetoric into reality
Andy Burnham enters Downing Street promising something that British politics has long badly needed: the possibility of a decisive change of direction. This vision of genuine economic and political change has so far been articulated, starting with Burnham’s People’s History Museum speech of 29 June 2026, in a number of specific commitments: to increased public control of utilities, to reindustrialisation, to a step-change in council housebuilding, and to a radical decentralisation of power and resources to the regions, institutionalised in a “Number 10 North”. More broadly, Burnham’s promise turns on a larger commitment that government can once again take responsibility for shaping the economy and spreading “good growth in every postcode”.
Burnham’s promise to “fix the big things” that are wrong with the British economy immediately raises a question: what institutions could turn that ambition into reality? Without an answer, there is a risk that the radical change in rhetoric will not be accompanied by real change at the level of results. Burnham will need to find effective ways to defeat the deep tendencies towards centralisation, economic timidity and ‘business-as-usual’ that have created and entrenched the country’s economic woes, and which made the Starmer government such a comprehensive disappointment. If there is real appetite in the new administration to turn rhetoric into reality, Community Wealth Building offers a clear institutional approach to turn the ambitions that Andy Burnham has articulated into concrete reality in every part of the country.
Community Wealth Building is a broad-based economic development strategy that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It aims to develop a new economic paradigm from the ground up, starting in neighbourhoods and building through cities and counties, regions, and nations. It provides a tested way of transferring economic power to places, rooting productive investment in local communities, and giving people a greater stake in the institutions that govern their economic lives.
As we will argue below, the clearest way to achieve this would be through a new Community Wealth Building Act, which would have the power to rewire the foundations of the British economy, and to embody the level of ambition that Burnham’s economic vision would require.
The central argument is simple: The time for business-as-usual “fixes” is over. Britain needs a deep transformation of its economic system, one that expands the democratic economy and radically shifts power back to working people and communities. Community Wealth Building is a powerful and proven way to achieve this goal.
The Productive State, ‘Manchesterism’ and the Role of Community Wealth Building
Burnham’s agenda has prompted progressive policy experts to consider how such a programme could be delivered in government. Perhaps the most substantive and intriguing contribution thus far is The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, published for the Labour-aligned think tank and campaign group Mainstream. The pamphlet is a valuable intervention in the debate about Britain’s future political economic direction, and offers a strong analysis of the UK’s structural problems after four decades of neoliberalism.
The pamphlet’s central proposals are to convert failing utilities and key services into “arms-length” public corporations with certain degrees of democratic accountability and public participation; to shift the state towards public production where necessary (based on an analysis of the structure and impact of markets); to empower local and regional government to develop revenue-generating assets, including public housing and network infrastructure; and to challenge wealth extraction in the foundational economy.
The focus on public corporations is particularly important because it offers a route to reverse decades of privatisation, which has hollowed out state capacity, driven up costs for service users and governments, and undermined service quality and availability. It has the potential to make “public control” mean more than stronger regulation, by placing public utilities and infrastructure back into not-for-profit forms of common ownership.
Lawrence and Williams’ pamphlet also emphasises worker and community empowerment, including representation on the boards of new public corporations. This addresses one of the central weaknesses of the post-war “Morrisonian” nationalisations. Although that model transferred private monopolies into public ownership, it did not give workers and consumers meaningful decision-making power. Nor did it build a strong connection between industries, their workforces, consumers, and wider communities. This made those industries easier for the Thatcher government and its successors to privatise.
While The Productive State provides a distinctive account of how a Burnham government could rebuild public capacity and reshape Britain’s political economy, Community Wealth Building provides the mechanisms through which those ambitions can become embedded in local economies and more democratic localities. This includes through procurement and investment processes involving public and other non-profit “anchor institutions,” collaborations between public institutions and local democratic organisations (such as cooperatives), and decentralising power to democratic forms of municipal enterprise.
After decades of destructive free-market economics, the proposals in The Productive State could potentially lead to a significant shift of wealth and power back towards working families and communities. Community Wealth Building can strengthen and extend this agenda by ensuring that national productive capacity contributes to, and is anchored by, strong local institutions, democratic ownership, and empowered places.
Why Community Wealth Building is the essential means to realise Andy Burnham’s economic agenda
Data across numerous economic, social, and political indicators show that the United Kingdom needs a significant structural transformation to address the crises created by decades of extractive economic policy and rapidly shifting global economic conditions. Since the 1970s, wealth and power have been redistributed away from working people and their communities on a vast scale. The inflation-adjusted wealth of Britain’s billionaires has increased by more than 1,000 per cent since 1990; meanwhile more than one in four of Britain’s children live in poverty,. The long decline of organised labour has fundamentally shifted economic power away from workers, and the agency that working people once enjoyed over their working lives within the post-war settlement has been steadily eroded. Britain’s economy today is marked by exploitation and wealth extraction, driven by decades of privatisation, deregulation, deindustrialisation, and demutualisation.
Many of these trends are highlighted in The Democracy Collaborative’s UK Index of Systemic Trends, published this summer. Repairing this damage requires structural change and a fundamental reconstruction of Britain’s economic model at every level. The realities of our extractive and exploitative economy directly affect the physical and mental wellbeing of millions of people. For the future wellbeing of society, we cannot continue to skirt around the edges.
The advance of Community Wealth Building
Community Wealth Building provides the framework for the kind of structural transformation that the British economy needs. It is an approach to the economy that draws inspiration from a number of places that have built dense ecosystems of democratic ownership and locally rooted economic institutions, including the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain; Emilia-Romagna in Italy; Kerala in India; and Québec’s social economy. Rather than focusing only on particular sectors, Community Wealth Building seeks to transform the wider pattern of economic ownership and activity within place.
In its modern form, the approach came to wide public attention through the Cleveland Model in the United States. This used not-for-profit public and non-profit “anchor” institutions to substantially shift procurement spending, investment, and workforce development activities towards local economies, and help facilitate the creation of a network of worker-owned cooperatives that are supported and locally rooted by a democratic, community-controlled corporation.
In the UK, Community Wealth Building came to prominence through the ‘Preston Model’, which uses a wide range of levers to localise and democratise economic activity. These include: expanding democratic ownership, including municipal enterprise, community banking, worker and employee ownership, council housing, community energy, digital cooperatives, and community land trusts; anchor strategies to redirect spending towards local businesses and create new employment opportunities; the socially productive use of land and assets, especially to deliver substantial numbers of new social and affordable homes; and raising wage levels and improving workers’ rights. A 2023 study in The Lancet Public Health linked Preston's progressive procurement and living wage policies to improved mental health and economic inclusion, and a further study found that Preston's employment rate grew by 4% relative to comparable local authorities between 2015 and 2019, with the largest gains among disabled people, minority ethnic groups, and people with lower levels of formal education.
Since 2018, Community Wealth Building has expanded across the United Kingdom. The Scottish Government recently passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026, that requires localities across the country to develop CWB action plans. NHS England has increasingly recognised the NHS’s role as an anchor institution, using employment, procurement, land and partnerships to support local economic and social development. Trade unions, including CWU, Community, BFAWU, GMB, and the Scottish TUC, all actively support CWB to varying degrees. There has also been some, though limited, national adoption of CWB principles through food and defence procurement and Great British Energy. The next challenge is to move beyond partial adoption and deliver Community Wealth Building at scale.
Putting Community Wealth Building at the heart of government
Andy Burnham’s emphasis on empowering localities points towards an important broader insight: devolution requires not only political authority, but economic capability and democracy. Community Wealth Building provides many of the practical institutions through which devolved government can genuinely shape the development of local economies and deliver broad-based prosperity and ‘good growth’.
The case for structural change is clear. Community Wealth Building can help deliver fairness and equity for working-class communities while giving people a genuine stake in the economy. By expanding democratic ownership and local economic strength, it will also help address the economic insecurity the populist right seeks to exploit.
The Case for a Community Wealth Building Act
Our proposal is that the government could, and should, develop a new Community Wealth Building Act, alongside other programmes and proposals. Such an Act could draw on, but go beyond, examples such as the 2026 Scottish Community Wealth Building Act. The Act could create a general, facilitating framework at the national level, that would create the conditions for supercharging the devolution of economic power throughout the country at the local level. To achieve the kind of economic transformation Britain now so badly needs we propose the following eight-point programme:
1. Formally establish regional anchor networks that use public spending to support local businesses, raise wages, improve workers’ rights, expand the democratic economy, and create targeted recruitment strategies.
2. Audit public land and assets at a regional level to support a step change in council and social housebuilding, public, cooperative and community owned energy generation, and broader community ownership initiatives.
3. Create local and regional public banks that lend directly to households and the productive economy, while increasing the scope and scale of community banks and credit unions.
4. Expand worker and employee ownership through supportive public policies, including incentives and support for converting businesses being sold by retiring owners. This can be achieved through enacting and a UK-version of a “Marcora Law” to support the transfer of businesses into worker ownership, alongside providing funding for ‘gap coops’ (i.e. cooperatives created specifically to compete for public contracts) in key sectors, and establishing an employee ownership fund giving workers a genuine stake in medium and large enterprises.
5. Raise the national minimum wage incrementally to at least £15 an hour, link further increases to average earnings, and go beyond the 2025 Employment Rights Act in advancing sectoral bargaining.
6. Encourage widespread insourcing of public services, including adult social care and children’s services currently dominated by extractive equity capital.
7. Facilitate and encourage large public sector pension schemes to channel more investment into local job creation and community economic development while maintaining fiduciary responsibility. (Consider for example the more than £400 billion held by the Local Government Pension Scheme.)
8. Enable mayoral authorities and local government to establish municipally owned enterprises for key infrastructure services, develop city-owned commercial assets that generate revenue and stable employment, and acquire distressed private sector assets for social and community uses.
Conclusion: How to Deliver the Devolution of Economic Power
If Andy Burnham is serious about his level of ambition, his government will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the systemic failures of neoliberalism. These failures have both deepened social divisions and now threaten to destabilise conventional politics. But there is an opportunity for the United Kingdom to chart a new economic course that can deliver broadly shared prosperity and ecological sustainability in an emerging era of increased global volatility.
Community Wealth Building should be understood as one of the principal means through which Andy Burnham's agenda of democratic renewal, devolution and widely-shared prosperity can be translated into everyday government. This approach, which has been tried-and-tested in different parts of the country and in cities and regions around the world, shows how the real devolution of economic power could be embedded in practical institutional reality in every part of Britain. The question for a Burnham government is whether it is truly serious about delivering the economic transformation it has promised: if the political will to embrace this kind of deep change and to finally to move beyond the strictures of the failing neoliberal economy is really there, then Community Wealth Building shows the way forward for the Burnham government.
Matthew Brown is the Labour Leader of Preston City Council and a Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative thinktank. He is the co-author (with Rhian E. Jones) of Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater Books, 2021).
Martin O’Neill is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York and a member of The Democracy Collaborative’s board. He is the co-author (with Joe Guinan) of The Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity Press, 2020). They write in a personal capacity.