The Editor’s Post: ‘Utterly farcical’ - our UK Treasury Social Impact Investment Advisory Group saga

David Lyons 21st February 2025

Chasing the Treasury, celebrating the women shaping AI for good and asking if businesses are making ‘counterfeit profits’. This week’s view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.

“Utterly farcical”, “same old story”, “here we go again”. That’s just a taste of the responses we got on LinkedIn last week to our exclusive story about the UK government’s new Social Impact Investment Advisory Group.

To be clear, they weren’t comments on the quality of the Pioneers Post team’s reporting. Rather, they were reactions to the news we broke that the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group members don’t include any social entrepreneurs or representatives of social enterprise.

Judging from the comments, you – our audience – were extremely disappointed. You questioned how the group could ensure social impact investment would reach its full potential without the inclusion of anyone representing the end users of the investment.

One might assume that the names of a group advising the government should be announced publicly as a matter of course. But it took a huge amount of time and effort to get the full list of members.

The group was announced by the Treasury and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on 3 February. That week, I received no response at all from either the Treasury or DCMS to my numerous emails, phone calls and answering machine messages asking for the full list of members.

Last week, Social Enterprise UK, Cwmpas, Social Enterprise Northern Ireland and Social Enterprise Scotland published an open letter questioning whether social enterprise was represented in the group.

I then made more phone calls to the Treasury, finally getting a commitment to share the full list of group members with us by close of play on Thursday 13 February. It eventually arrived at 10:58 on Friday 14 February, eleven days after I’d originally asked for it.

The delay, according to the Treasury, was needing consent from each member of the group for their membership to be made public.

On seeing the full list, Social Enterprise UK CEO Peter Holbrook raised his worries about the lack of social enterprise representatives. He said: “We are hoping the government can and will quickly address these concerns and create a fairer solution – which is inclusive of the ultimate beneficiaries of these plans – the social enterprises working on the ground delivering for people and the planet.”

So, on Monday of this week, I got back in touch with the Treasury, to ask for a response to the questions about the membership of the group raised by SEUK and our audience and for an explanation of how the membership of the group was decided.

The response we got – which once again arrived several hours after our deadline – was this:

“Social investment is central to the prime minister’s Plan for Change. The Social Impact Investment Advisory Group will mobilise private investment to deliver social outcomes by bringing together the UK’s leading socially motivated investors, the voluntary sector and government to tackle some of our most complex social problems.

“We are committed to ensuring that the group reflects the full breadth of the ecosystem, engaging diverse perspectives across it. This includes those deploying capital as well as those receiving it, such as social enterprises, charities, and other purpose-driven businesses, to ensure their voices shape the conversation.”

I have spent ten years of my career working in civil society communications, so I can spot a mile off a statement attempting to be so bland that a story goes away: this is one of them.

We also asked several members of the group to share their thoughts on the response from SEUK and our audience. Some declined to comment, others were unavailable.

The only meaningful response we received was one source who, while not wanting to publicly comment, suggested there may be working groups established to feed into the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group, which could include social entrepreneurs.

Both our experience of trying to report on this story, and the imbalance of power in the membership of the Social Impact Investment Advisory Group, appear to reflect a wider criticism of the Labour government.

The prime minister Keir Starmer’s top-down approach to leadership and decision-making has been well documented. The demand for message discipline preventing meaningful dialogue or transparency is something my colleague Laura experienced when covering last year’s Labour Party Conference: a minister declined to have an on-the-record conversation as interviews needed to be approved well in advance through the party’s communications team – smiling awkwardly when asked if, really, the government didn’t even trust ministers to stay on message. (Given the unofficial exchange she had with him afterwards, she can confirm the minister very much toed the party line anyway).

This top-down approach should be anathema to how impact investment and social enterprise work. Principles such as co-design, proper consultation with end-users, and honest impact reporting are fundamental to delivering the social and environmental change that we need to see.

And this makes the Social Impact Investing Advisory Group membership, and the experience of reporting on it, all the more frustrating. Although the Treasury may be hoping to bore us into leaving them alone, we’re committed to following up on this story – as well as other policy initiatives around the world to support impact investing. Watch this space.