Social enterprise - Driving a Wellbeing Economy for Scotland: action plan 2024-2026

Annex A: Guiding Principles

In line with previous Action Plans, Scottish Government is committed to a number of guiding principles that underpin the delivery of the Action Plan across the next two years:

Co-produced

The Scottish Government continues to foster close co-operation with the social enterprise community and recognises the need to co-produce and co-deliver solutions. To ensure continuing co- production, we will form a strategic advisory group, reflective of the diverse society we live in and with appropriate representation to guide implementation of this action plan. Where required, a small number of sub groups and working groups supported by sector partners may be formed to progress key workstreams. This will ensure an effective voice for social enterprises, and share best practice among those organisations supporting the social enterprise sector. We will maintain a strong relationship with the sector based on effective communication, openness, transparency and trust.

Joined Up

There is recognition that many stakeholders, both internal and external, must play an active role if we are to deliver on the ambitions of the Action Plan. The recent move of Social Enterprise policy to now sit within the Director General Economy portfolio within Scottish Government offers the Social Enterprise policy team a strategic position; working across government and with national agencies to pursue parity of service and unlock the full potential of the sector – in areas such as economic development, education, and the environment. We will encourage greater recognition of social enterprise within government policies, plans and programmes and continue to ensure strong cross-directorate working to realise opportunities for the sector to be at the heart of the Scottish Government’s transition to a Wellbeing Economy, the mission to reduce inequalities and our journey towards Net Zero.

Through the delivery of this action plan we will engage with organisations across the public sector, encouraging them to adopt a Community Wealth Building approach, increasing their support for frontline social enterprises through the combined energy, resources and investment they can bring. This will build on the already significant contribution of partners through local social enterprise strategies and plans.

We will work directly with partners to bring forward support that is national in reach and local in impact. We will ensure that any funding opportunities are clearly communicated and that the work we fund will complement and add value to the already vibrant support ecosystem.

Evidence-Based

We recognise that within this extremely difficult financial climate, the work introduced as part of this action plan must be based on the best available evidence and that it must remain responsive to the needs of the sector as it evolves. We will continue to be led by evidence produced in the biennial census of social enterprise activity, an objective source of data on the contribution, characteristics and needs of the sector. The latest census will be published at the end of 2024 and continues to be supported by a representative steering group from within the social enterprise ecosystem. The results will help us better understand the changing needs of the sector as we continue to work through the current cost-of-living crisis.

Where possible we will combine data available from the social enterprise census with other evidence produced by national agencies and sector partners to produce a fuller picture of the contribution of our investment and impact on the sector.

Funded projects will be monitored against agreed strategic outcomes to ensure that programmes and activity remain effective and increasingly provide good value for money.

Responsive to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

We must ensure the activity we directly fund is open and accessible to social entrepreneurs and social enterprises across Scotland. We will ensure that activity supported under this action plan is inclusive in its design and reach. In particular it should:

• Embrace the Fair Work Framework^[20];
• Remain equally accessible to rural and island communities, reflecting the particular needs of these communities in line with the commitments of the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018; and
• Actively seek to reflect the diversity of Scotland, with particular respect to protected characteristics as set out in the Equality Act by taking an intersectional equality approach to delivery that fully considers the impact of actions on people with protected characteristics and seeks to remove barriers to participation.

We will build these considerations into our funding processes and, where necessary, provide additional focus and support for targeted groups or locations as informed by the census.

Financially Sustainable

We will ensure that activity supported under the Action Plan is efficiently delivered and designed with financial sustainability at its core. This principle recognises the mixed economy of resourcing that social enterprise needs whilst working with organisations to realise enterprise potential where viable.

Any funding will be focused on programme activity which aims to provide a national level of support across the social enterprise sector where there is evidence of effectiveness, where it is viewed as central to the implementation of the Action Plan and where it is consistent with its guiding principles.

We will continue to work towards our ambition for Fairer Funding. Our Fairer Funding principles build upon the long standing issues relating to single year grants, lack of uplifts, late notification of grants and inflexible grant conditions. This is in line with Scottish Government’s long-term ambition to embed systemic change and adoption of longer-term strategic approaches which maximise impact whilst achieving greater efficiencies than those secured through making annual commitments only.

We are committed to ensuring that grant making is continuously improved and that best practice in grant management is mainstreamed across government. We have already taken steps to clarify grant conditions for both grant managers and grant holders as well as applying proportionate reporting measures in our grant-making practices as standard.