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Leveraging value from the Wigan Pound

The problem

The idea

Our population is living longer albeit with limiting long term health problems, made worse by inequality. Costs of traditional provision are increasing and mainstream services such as residential care face huge stress. Public funding cuts will reduce Council spending by 25% and the Government hope is that local communities will come forward with private sector to take the place of public services.

Rather than accept this “perfect storm” view, Wigan Council wants to develop a new form of economic regeneration using personal social care budgets for 7,000 people as the lever.

We spend over £65m on personal budgets (double if you add in health and private spending). It’s a big economy and we want to maximise its influence – for those who need care and for people who can benefit from jobs and prosperity.

Wigan may still be held back by economic and social legacy (Wigan ranked 296th / 324 local authorities in October 2010 for resilience to recession) and may also be hampered by low formal volunteering (less than 20%). However local people describe themselves as good neighbours prepared to help others and take part in community activity (60 – 70%).

Our proposal is a set of design experiments to test how Hometown+ platform can connect latent supply and demand to extract maximum value into, and out of, the social care economy.

Our experiments will test for real:

How to capitalise on informal networks in neighbourhoods – using cash / credits to incentivise local people / enterprise (suppliers) and budget holders (buyers).

How to create new micro markets with nano-enterprise development – networking ideas through co-design / co-production. 

How to engage whole population in complementary currency - making the Wigan pound go further; rewarding good neighbours / volunteering; promoting “buy local”; providing authentic outcomes for business corporate social responsibility objectives.

What we need

Tags

NESTACC

Wigan Council