Community Wealth Fund capitalised far below its designed scale

After Local Trust's decade-long campaign, dormant assets will fund a Community Wealth Fund for left-behind neighbourhoods at £87.5m, matched by £87.5m of Lottery money for £175m in total, delivering £1-2.5m per neighbourhood over ten years to a limited set of areas. Campaign modelling envisaged a permanent endowment an order of magnitude larger, reaching the hundreds of qualifying neighbourhoods. Only about £90m more is forecast to enter the English scheme by 2028, contested between four causes.

Neighbourhoods with low social infrastructure are where civic participation, health and economic outcomes are worst, and long-horizon patient capital is the only funding type Big Local showed to work there. Underscale means a postcode lottery among equally deprived places.

A statutory commitment of a fixed share of all future dormant-assets tranches to the fund, faster onboarding of pensions, insurance and securities assets into the expanded scheme, and a philanthropic and corporate match campaign to build a £1bn permanent endowment.

// State-led: Instrument: statutory share of future dormant-assets tranches; the philanthropic match campaign only supplements state-controlled capital.

Patient capital is the only thing shown to work in the worst-off neighbourhoods, and the fund exists, is funded and is merely underscale, which makes this a scaling fight.