The Professional Awareness Gap: Why Advisers Still Don't Get CICs

I had a call last week from a solicitor in Birmingham who was advising a client against setting up a CIC because, and I quote, “you can’t make any money from one.” Two days before that, I spoke to an accountant in Manchester who told a community group that they’d be better off as a charity because “CICs can’t get funding.” And just yesterday, I heard from a CIC founder whose bank manager — one of the high street names — told them flatly that the bank “doesn’t deal with CICs.”

Let me be direct about this. When a bank makes a blanket statement of that kind, they may well be in breach of European law. But more importantly, every instance of bad advice like this is a potential CIC that never gets formed, a community project that never gets off the ground, a social business that never gets started.

The awareness problem is real and it’s damaging.

At the Cambridge meeting last month, I raised this issue because it’s one of the most consistent themes in the feedback we’re getting from our members. We now have nearly 500 practitioners in the CIC Association network, and the stories they tell about their encounters with professional advisers are remarkably similar. There’s no standardised understanding of what a CIC is, what it can do, and how it differs from both charities and ordinary companies. You can ask three different business advisers the same question about CICs and get three different answers.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the professionals themselves. The CIC legislation is only four years old. There’s no established curriculum for it. It’s not something that accountants study for their professional qualifications, or that solicitors encounter in their training, or that business advisers are tested on. Most of them simply don’t know, and the ones who think they know are sometimes more dangerous than the ones who admit they don’t.

The solution isn’t complicated. We need standardised, authoritative information about CICs that professional advisers can access and use. We need CPD modules for accountants — I’ve been discussing this with Heidi Fisher, who will be helping us develop a pilot programme out of Birmingham. We need template legal documents that solicitors can work from. We need a central resource that any professional adviser can point to and trust.

The CIC Association has started building this. Our online platform is already sharing case studies and best practice. But we need far more. We need the professional bodies — the ICAEW, the Law Society, the Institute of Business Advisers — to recognise that CICs are a significant and growing part of the business landscape and to incorporate them into their training and guidance.

In the meantime, if you’re a CIC founder and your adviser tells you something that doesn’t sound right, question it. Push back. And get in touch with us. We’re building a knowledge base of real CIC practice, and every example of bad advice we can document helps us make the case for change.

The CIC model is too important to be undermined by ignorance. Let’s fix this.

John Mulkerrin is co-founder of the CIC Association. If you’ve experienced poor advice about CICs from a professional adviser, please share your story on the Association’s online network.