Making Places Better, Together
UK citizens lend money to the UK Government through National Savings and Investments (NS&Is). What if they could do the same for local authorities?
Revitalising civic life in Britain is a major challenge. One lever that can be pulled in pursuit of that ambition is to find new ways of harnessing the resources of places to support productive investment in the public infrastructure communities share and rely upon.
Community Municipal Investments (CMIs) provide councils and city-regions with access to locally based capital, building new opportunities for civic engagement while enabling money to circulate within local economies to the benefit of local people.
UK households hold £2.4 trillion in savings. Local authorities need long-term, affordable capital. CMIs could be the mechanism to connect the two – putting people’s money to work locally, building treasury resilience while revitalising civic life.
The Project
Funded by an ESRC Impact Accelerator Account award via the Leeds Institute for Societal Futures (LISF), Professor Mark Davis and Dr Emma Hyde in the School of Sociology and Social Policy have gathered together evidence of the civic impact of the CMI in this new report.
CMIs were co-created through research in the School back in 2019 through the Financing for Society project. A CMI is a direct loan to UK councils from residents, other citizen-investors and values-aligned institutional investors. Usually held over a 5-year term and managed by the innovative finance platform, Abundance Investment, CMIs pay fixed cash interest payments to investors every six months across that period.
By Summer 2026, the model has been used by 19 councils and across the political spectrum, raising close to £30 million of investment.
“I really do think that this allows you to build some more trust with the community, in that you’ve said you’re going to do this thing, you have then done that thing, and that’s their money that’s self-financed that. They’ve directly contributed.” (Patrick Rowe, Strategic Finance Manager, Westminster City Council)
Key Findings
In this report, Davis and Hyde focus on the ‘non-financial’ impact of the model, chiefly how it is delivering civic value for councils and investors.
Interviewing councillors and officers across the 19 councils, as well as analysing evidence from a survey of over 300 investors in the model, the report finds that CMIs:
- provide a new opportunity for councils to communicate with residents, helping them to better understand the role and impact of their local council and to strengthen public confidence and trust over time
- enable people to have a meaningful stake in improving the places they care about, fostering greater local participation in making improvements to place for residents and local businesses
- generates a stronger sense of optimism that, while some will move more quickly than others, through successive CMI launches councils can grow a pool of committed local investors
- provides a mechanism to build new relationships within and across local authorities and city-regions, helping to share knowledge and develop shared civic missions
- reflect a wider belief that councils who work with their residents are rewarded for responding visibly to the needs of a local area, boosting feelings of trust and hope in local government.
“It’s funding initiatives that mean something to me, in a place that means something to me.” (CMI Investor)
The report also found that, amongst investors:
- 66.3% want to know more about the positive community impact the council(s) they’ve invested in are making.
- 59.8% feel that the council(s) they’ve invested in are working in partnership with its citizens / residents.
- 47.3% trust the council(s) they’ve invested in more knowing that it is delivering the projects from their investment.
Call to Action
The report concludes with a Call to Action – asking UK Government and values-aligned organisations to help scale the model for the public good, offering a new way for devolved administrations to work in partnership with local people to deliver good growth in every postcode. To realise these benefits, CMIs need:
Promotion: In the same way government promotes National Savings and Investments (NS&I), we need a national public information campaign for CMIs. They need a trusted national touchstone and champion for more people to understand and use the model.
Legislation: CMI’s are feasible and easily replicable now with a standardised legal framework in place. However, there is more that primary legislation can do, such as local planning applications to be able to include local investment models as indicators of local support for infrastructure projects. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) needs to re-regulate its rules on financial promotion, which were not designed with the longevity and risk-profile of UK councils in mind.
Advocacy: The devolution agenda to empower strategic and mayoral authorities will include new and ongoing settlements for the capital programmes of our places.
The report calls on central government to advocate for the blended use of CMIs in the capital programme related to these settlements. CMIs need to be included as part of the negotiations with local government over the way in which central funding and debt programmes combine to deliver local services, programmes and infrastructure.
Download the New Report (pdf), File Download Download the Screen Reader version (pdf), File DownloadCite the report
Davis M and Hyde E (2026) Making Places Better, Together: The Civic Impact of Community Municipal Investments. Leeds: University of Leeds/Green Finance Institute.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48785/100/514
Next Steps
Having made the civic case for Community Municipal Investments (CMI), anyone who wishes to respond to the calls to action included in this report may contact the following:
Professor Mark Davis - [email protected]
Dr Emma Hyde - [email protected]
Miles Ashton (Green Finance Institute) - [email protected]
Karl Harder (Abundance Investment) - [email protected]
