Social impact agreements: Tips and templates
Which terms work best for social impact occupiers? Fixed rent vs. revenue share? How to report on social impact?
Read our guide to developing a social impact agreement below, and download your free Principles and Heads of Terms templates.
A new way of working
More than ever, town centre asset owners and landlords of different kinds are seeing the need to use their buildings for social and environmental impact as well as a financial return – and to work in partnership with local authorities and community organisations to do this.
Historically, there's been a lack of understanding and trust between asset owners and occupiers – a sense of ‘us versus them’. We’ve heard that this is in part due to a lack of relationships and shared language:
Asset owners and agents: Often don’t have pre-existing relationships or established ways of working with small local businesses and Socially-Trading Organisations (STOs)
Small businesses & Socially-Trading Organisations (would-be occupiers): Often don’t have pre-existing relationships with asset owners and agents, don’t have experience of leasing commercial property, or budgets to pay commercial negotiators and solicitors
Local authorities: Typically receive many requests for help to find space from STOs, but often don’t know who owns town centre buildings or how to bring them to the table. Due to budgetary pressures, council property teams tend to have income generation targets around use of their own commercial property, which hinders potential use by STOs.
But this culture is starting to shift. Progressive asset owners like Legal & General have done this in Poole. Islington Council are leading the way with their Affordable Workspace programme, as are Bywater Properties in Belfast and Ellandi in Bootle.
This is why Platform Places is backing and replicating the Local Property Partnership model – because it weaves relationships and trust back into places.
Platform Places has developed two downloadable documents to help you work collaboratively with STO occupiers:
Principles for working together – as agreed by the asset owners and STO leaders behind Platform Places
A template Heads of Terms that you can use as a basis for your social impact lease, drafted by legal firm Shoosmiths
Simply fill in the fields below to download your editable templates.
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