26,000 CICs — and the Cost-of-Living Crisis Is About to Test All of Us

The register hit 26,065 CICs in 2022, with 5,339 new approvals. That’s a level of growth that would have seemed impossible when I started. Nearly a thousand new CICs every month. Twenty-six thousand organisations, each one a bet that community enterprise can work.

And the cost-of-living crisis is going to test every single one of them.

Energy prices are spiking. Inflation is running at levels we haven’t seen in decades. Real wages are falling. Local authorities are cutting budgets. The combination is lethal for organisations that operate on thin margins and serve vulnerable communities.

I’ve been doing this long enough to recognise the pattern. A funding crisis hits, and the organisations that suffer most are the ones that were already struggling. CICs, which operate with lower reserves and thinner margins than most, are in the firing line.

But here’s what gives me hope. The pandemic proved that CICs can pivot faster than almost any other organisational form. When lockdown hit, CICs didn’t wait for instructions from head office. They assessed the need and responded. The same thing is already happening with the cost-of-living crisis. Food bank CICs are scaling up. Warm bank CICs are appearing. Mental health CICs are seeing demand surge and finding ways to meet it.

The 2022 numbers show something else worth noting. Dissolutions rose to 3,087 — 12% of the register, up from 7% in 2021. Some of that is the pandemic support ending. Some of it is pandemic-specific CICs that served their purpose and wound down. But some of it is the cost-of-living crisis beginning to bite.

Twenty-six thousand CICs is a milestone to acknowledge. But the next two years will tell us more about the resilience of the model than the last ten did. If CICs can survive a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis in quick succession, there’s nothing the economy can throw at them that they can’t handle.

If they can’t, we’ll need to ask some hard questions about what support they need.