Last month, ActionFunder and NLA brought together leaders from across the built environment, local government and the voluntary sector to ask an urgent question: how do we turn social value from good intention into genuine impact?
£9 billion unspent. Communities cannot wait
£9 billion is currently sitting unspent in UK local authority accounts. Earmarked for communities. Raised through Section 106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) contributions, money that exists specifically to support local people.
And yet, it remains unspent.
Not because there isn’t need. Not because there isn’t intent. But because the system designed to deliver it is slow, complex and difficult to navigate.
That was the starting point for How to GiveAF, hosted by ActionFunder in partnership with the NLA at The London Centre. A room of developers, housing associations, contractors, local authorities and community organisations, all, in different ways, frustrated with the same problem.
The gap between intention and impact
Catherine Staniland, Chief Impact Officer at NLA, set the tone.
The built environment shapes daily life, homes, streets, workplaces, and public spaces. Few sectors have more influence over how communities function and feel.
And yet:
“The lived experience for communities doesn’t always match what’s written on paper.”
That gap, between what is promised and what is felt, is where trust begins to erode.
This is not a question of ambition. The sector is full of people who want to do the right thing. The £9 billion figure makes that clear.
As ActionFunder CEO Mark Shearer put it:
“The system is broken, not because people don’t care, but because it’s very, very difficult to implement social impact at the moment.”
Saving society’s safety net
Charlotte Hill OBE, CEO of The Felix Project, brought the reality into focus.
“Four in ten working Londoners are struggling to put food on the table at certain points in the month.”
These are working households. But when costs rise, food becomes the only flexible part of the budget. And when that breaks, the voluntary sector steps in.
“The voluntary sector is the safety net that is stopping people falling through the cracks. Times have never been harder, but we have never needed it more.”
Demand continues to surge. Yet many of the organisations meeting that need operate on under £10,000 a year, often volunteer-led.
This is the tension at the heart of the issue. Need is rising. The voluntary sector is stretched. And yet funding remains stuck in systems that struggle to release it.
We do not have a funding problem. We have a delivery problem.
You can have your cake and eat it
There is still a belief that social value comes at the expense of commercial success. That it is a trade-off.
Peter Freeman challenged that directly:
“You can have your cake and eat it.”
At King’s Cross, the fountains at Granary Square cost £4 million. They generate no direct income and carry ongoing costs. On paper, they do not make commercial sense.
And yet, they helped create one of London’s most vibrant public spaces, a place people actively choose to spend time. That visibility and sense of place played a key role in attracting global occupiers like Google and Meta.
Social value is not separate from commercial success. Done well, it underpins it.
The real friction is not intent. It’s process
So if the need is clear and the business case is clear, what is stopping delivery?
Councillor Majid Rahman, until recently Cabinet Member for Planning at the Royal Borough of Greenwich, offered a grounded answer:
“Well-intentioned initiatives are only as strong as the quality of our engagement. And engagement done well requires resources that we don’t always have.”
Local authorities are managing complex funding programmes on top of stretched workloads. Applications are processed manually. Due diligence is slow. Getting money out the door is harder still.
Funding exists. Demand exists. But the two fail to meet.
From compliance to core strategy
Across the evening, one idea kept resurfacing. Social value is still too often treated as a tick-box exercise.
But that framing is starting to break. The scale of need has shifted. Expectations have shifted. And the business case is becoming harder to ignore.
The built environment has capital, influence and long-term presence in communities. The voluntary sector understands need. Local authorities sit between the two.
What is missing is the infrastructure that connects them, turning funding into outcomes and intention into impact.
As Mark Shearer put it:
“Never before has there been a better time. Communities are up for it, and businesses are absolutely desperate to show what they can do.”
The barrier is no longer awareness; it’s action.
What’s the solution?
The question is no longer whether the built environment can play a role; it is whether it is willing to invest in the systems that enable delivery.
In Greenwich, that gap was addressed. Using CIL funds, the council launched its largest-ever community fund, supported by ActionFunder’s platform.
The result: over £3 million in applications processed, 35,000 residents engaged, and funding successfully distributed across neighbourhoods, all while reducing the administrative burden on the council team.
As Cllr Majid Rahman put it:
“It helped us fund more projects, engage more residents, and created a better outcome for the programmes overall.”
£9 billion is already available. Communities are already in need. The opportunity is sitting in plain sight, the question is how you unlock it.
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