Over the last year, the Democratic Finance team has been exploring the community bond landscape in Scotland and across the UK. We knew of a handful of examples of community bonds (a type of debt security issued by community groups) in Scotland, and we knew that they were being used extensively in community renewables in England on platforms such as Ethex, but we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what community bonds looked like in practice, what they were used for and who was using them. This will help us develop the Democratic Finance Scotland programme and ensure that we understand the demand for this type of finance in Scotland and how we can best support groups access it, if there is indeed demand.

We’re publishing two documents today:

• A brief summary report looking at what community bonds are, who can issue them, and a high level summary of our findings on what community bonds look like across the UK and in Scotland,
• A full report for those of you who like to dig a little deeper into the data.

This research has highlighted some areas that we’d like to explore further. We can see that the use of community bonds in Scotland has been quite limited to date in comparison to England – we have some hunches about why that is but more research could open this up further. We would like to compare this type of finance to commercial and social investment, as well as community shares to understand why people choose to use this type of finance as well as/instead of others, and in what circumstances. This will help us understand when we could suggest this to groups we’re working with as we explore their democratic finance options.

We can also see that there’s a need to raise awareness about this type of finance in Scotland as part of a suite of democratic finance options, and discuss whether this is a type of finance that groups would be interested in, and could see the use for alongside options more commonly used in Scotland such as community shares or social investment. That’s why we’re planning to run a session for DTAS members and clients of the DF programme in September to present this research in a bit more depth, with a discussion about whether groups can see the application of this type of finance to situations they’ve faced historically or projects they are currently developing.

Look out for more information on this session on the DTAS Eventbrite and we’ll send a reminder out nearer the time. In the meantime, enjoy the reports and fire over any questions to laura@dtascot.org.uk