Last week Social Business International jointly hosted an event with the British Embassy in Helsinki. UK Localism and Cities Minister, the Rt. Hon. Greg Clark, MP, travelled out to Finland to take part in the seminar, along with two UK social innovators Garath Symonds of Surrey County Council and Geoff Walker from Sandwell Community Caring Trust (SCCT). They were joined by Emmanuel Vallens from DG Markt of the European Commission and Permanent secretary, Kari Välimäki from the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health.

The audience of 60 high level representatives from Finnish national and local government, innovation funders and social enterprises heard Greg Clark explain why the UK Government strongly supports social enterprise. He talked about some of the measures currently being adopted to encourage more social enterprise solutions through new legislation that gives communities the “right to challenge” the status quo in the way local services are provided and bid to run them. He also outlined the Government’s support for the creation of Big Society Capital, the new financial institution that will increase the supply of finance to social enterprises in the UK.

The audience also learned about the radical approach Surrey County Council has taken to de-commissioning their services for young people and how they have re-commissioned them using an outcomes-based approach.  In the old days they produced heavy, 400 page tomes specifying everything down to the size and height of the signs outside their youth centres. Now they focus on getting the best outcomes for young people into employment, training or education encouraging a diverse range of providers to come up with the best ways of doing so.

Participants also heard how SCCT span out from a local authority and grew from a small business caring for 62 people with 85 staff to one that cares for over 800 people with 600 staff and from £1M to £15M turnover. In particular Geoff Walker explained how using an innovative and empowering business model could cut costs and inefficiency but retain good staff pay and conditions and above improve the quality of the care they provide, offering ‘better for less’.

Despite the language and cultural differences it was clear that the UK and Finland share many common features. Many of our challenges are the same:  an ageing population, increased needs for services but limited resources from tax-payers to fund them. Both countries need new solutions and it was clear from the discussions in the seminar that to foster innovation in service delivery there are two sides to the coin.  Commissioners need to frame things in a way that allows providers like Geoff Walker to come up with solutions that have impact. There is also a need for new models for service provision and that means having new kinds of business, such as SCCT that compete in a diverse market place. Indeed, the issue of market development and management was seen as the key to unlocking the potential for innovation.

The European Commission has started to recognise the need for more plurality of business form within the Single Market Act and has specifically focused on social enterprise in the Social Business Initiative. Emmanuel Vallens of DG Markt highlighted the measures being developed by the Commission which were announced last year and in particular the proposals to remove barriers to social enterprises in the procurement and state aid regulations and to improve access to finance.

There was a lively panel discussion and debate from the floor and a lot of interest in how the nascent social enterprise sector in Finland could be supported and developed. There are some big barriers in Finland.  Most of the attention of Finnish local authorities is on mergers in a move for them to be economically viable, rather than on how to commission services differently.

However, there are developments in places like Oulu, Tampere and Espoo and there is interest elsewhere. Awareness is slowly being raised about social entrepreneurship and a Finnish social enterprise mark was launched at the end of last year.

What is really needed is a more enabling environment in Finland (and in other European countries). Some of the UK practice and the Social Business Initiative from the European Commission are instructive about areas to focus on. This can be categorised as what I call the three M’s – markets, money and models. That is how to:

• develop and manage public service markets

• ensure access to the right kind of investment

• promote and understand a range of social business models

The challenge is, whether national Governments like the Finnish one will act on the opportunity they have to support local authorities and social enterprises in providing these much needed dynamic solutions?

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