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Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point. He is right to emphasise the riskier approach, because sometimes there is a risk. For example, in my constituency, the local council decided to let the contract for the running of the local leisure centre to a charitable trust based in Poole. It became apparent that the trust was not delivering on what was set out in the contract, and after several years the contract had to be taken back in-house. Subsequently, a couple of other projects that the trust was running were found to be financially unsustainable, and that was the end of that, I think. We must not get into a frame of mind in which we think that anything that calls itself a social enterprise is, by definition, a good thing. Such bodies have to be run along business lines. To take another example, people in Verwood—a town that is no longer in my constituency, sadly, but was until the time of the last general election—have set up a community enterprise called the Verwood Hub, which is a community centre. Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that they have not been applying business principles to the running of that centre, so they are having to go back to the local authority and say, ““Please give us some more money.”” The local authority is making it clear that it can go only so far in doing that, because there is a limit to how much it can be expected to use local taxpayers' money to make up for the deficiencies in the business plan of what might otherwise be described as a laudable community enterprise.