Finance

As a new pilot attempts to join up the dots of community finance, Clare Goff asks whether the time is ripe for an alternative finance revolution 

‘Money is round and it rolls away’, a wise person once said. In our local economies a lot of money is rolling away, into the pockets of payday lenders, large finance and big business. Doorstep lenders prey on the vulnerable, sucking them into a lifetime of debt; detached and distant banks refuse loans to small and new businesses; money rolls out of local areas, trapping places in a spiral of poverty and inertia.

When in July last year the Treasury announced that the UK’s biggest lenders were revealing how much they lent at a local level, like most people who work closely in trying to understand and address financial and social exclusion, we in Birmingham felt that this was a significant breakthrough.