The £9 Billion Opportunity Sitting in Plain Sight

Tuesday 14 April 2026

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The £9 Billion Opportunity Sitting in Plain Sight

Social value discussions at ActionFunder and NLA event. Photo Credit: Cecil Agyemang.

Following NLA’s How to GiveAF event, Mark Shearer, Co-Founder and CEO of ActionFunder, explores how £9bn in unspent funding could be unlocked to deliver real impact for communities.

£9 billion unspent. Communities cannot wait

£9 billion is currently sitting unspent in UK local authority accounts. Earmarked for communities, it has been raised through Section 106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) contributions, funding intended to support local people.

And yet, it remains unspent.

Not because there isn’t need, or intent, but because the systems designed to deliver it are often slow, complex and difficult to navigate.

That was the starting point for How to GiveAF, hosted by ActionFunder in partnership with NLA at The London Centre. The event brought together developers, housing associations, contractors, local authorities and community organisations, many facing similar challenges in unlocking this funding.

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 committed to making a difference, and the £9 billion figure reflects that intent.

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.”

Supporting society’s safety net

Charlotte Hill OBE, CEO of The Felix Project, highlighted the scale of the need:

“Four in ten working Londoners are struggling to put food on the table at certain points in the month.”

These are working households, where rising costs mean food becomes the only flexible part of the budget. 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 grow, yet many organisations meeting that need operate on under £10,000 a year, often led by volunteers.

This is the tension at the heart of the issue: need is rising, the voluntary sector is stretched, and yet funding remains tied up in systems that struggle to release it.

We do not have a funding problem. We have a delivery problem.

Social value and commercial success

There is still a perception 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 may not appear commercially viable.

And yet, they helped create one of London’s most vibrant and successful public spaces, a place people actively choose to spend time. That visibility and sense of place played a key role in the arrival of global occupiers such as 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

If both need and business are clear, what is preventing 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 can be slow and distributing funds presents further challenges.

Funding exists. Demand exists. But the two do not always connect.

From compliance to core strategy

Across the evening, one idea kept resurfacing: social value is still too often treated as a tick-box exercise.

That is beginning to shift. The scale of need is growing, expectations are evolving and the business case is becoming harder to ignore.

The built environment brings 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 is the solution?

The question is no longer whether the built environment can play a role; but how it can better support 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.

Attendees of the event can access ActionFunder with three months free in their first year. Enquire before the end of April to claim this offer. If you missed the event, all NLA members can benefit from one month free.

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Mark Shearer

Co-Founder and CEO
Actionfunder