Community Wealth Building

Community Wealth Building is about creating a resilient and inclusive economy for the benefit of Torbay. It’s about making more local employment in our area and a larger and more diverse business base, ensuring that wealth is locally owned and benefits local people. 

Adopting this approach provides value for our communities wherever possible, through the goods we buy, people we employ, assets we own and the powers we have that can bring about change to maximise Torbay’s local economic opportunities. 

The five key principles of Community Wealth Building are:

• Progressive procurement of goods and services – procuring goods and commissioning locally, to develop dense local supply chains within our local business community and stimulate employment by retaining a greater propensity of wealth locally.  Find out more about becoming a supplier

• Fair employment and just labour markets – progressive practice to stimulate the local economy and bring social improvements to local communities, by recruiting from lower income areas, commitment to paying the real living wage, and creating career progression opportunities. Find out more on our jobs and careers pages. 

• Plural ownership of the economy – wealth generated within the economy to stay in the local area. It’s about developing and growing small enterprises, community organisations, and cooperatives. Visit out Start Up, Stay Up, Scale Up page to fond out more.

• Making financial power work for local places – directing financial investments through pension funds and local authority investments towards local priorities and bringing transformative capital to locally rooted enterprises. 

• From socially productive use of land and property – through the development of underutilised assets for community use. 

Anchor institutions 

To achieve the most value and benefit for Torbay we work closely and collaborate with our local anchor institutions; our place-based organisations, invested in Torbay: 

• Torbay Council 
• Torbay and South Devon Foundation Trust 
• South Devon College 

These organisations spend substantial amounts of money that is retained within our local area. They cannot relocate to another part of the country, have significant procurement and investment spend which can be spent locally and their economic potential harnessed. 

Anchor institutions have a collective interest in seeing their local area improve and we are always looking for opportunities to collaborate further.