At Firstport, we evaluated our services over the past five years. I am talking about young, fledgling businesses, because we work with individuals from a standing start. We found that the social enterprises that were up and running had stayed up and running and had been going for, say, just under three years. On average, they created 2.4 jobs in their areas and about 140 people benefited from each enterprise.
We tried to find some harder statistics. Marco Biagi is right. Because we are not necessarily delivering the social impact, it is hard for us to go out and measure it. However, it is important to realise that not all social enterprises are set up to deliver public services. Many of them trade like ordinary businesses and deal directly with the consumer.
I will tell you about a particular initiative that Firstport has been running in Glasgow, which is part of the Commonwealth games legacy. We started a project called beyond the finish line. We set ourselves a target of working with 10 young social entrepreneurs at a very early stage and gave them a deadline of the games to get up and running. The quality and variety of ideas were so good that we ended up working with 15 of them, and I am pleased to say that, by the time the games kicked off, about 10 of them were trading.
Many of those businesses were from the creative industries—they were businesses with craft-based products and environmental upcycling businesses. We find that the biggest issue that those young businesses now face is finding the right kind of affordable short-term lease. At a local level, there is a real issue with how landlords approach that. That will be the case not only for social enterprises; I think that it is an issue for small businesses across the board.
A really positive outcome of that work, not just in Glasgow but across Scotland, would be for local landlords, whether the local authority in the properties that it owns or some of the absent landlords, to start really looking at that issue, because we would all benefit from that.
We have demonstrated that social enterprise can tackle the problem of empty shops and vacant spaces in the high street. Nobody wants to walk down the street and see them. Retail is not the only answer and it is not providing us with the whole solution. A social enterprise can go in and deliver a completely different experience. Our high streets are places to learn, to be creative, to meet and to be active, and all those things are important.
That brings me back to the question of the value of the role that social enterprise can play. The regeneration agenda is not just about economic regeneration. It can help to make an impact on that, but only if we all work together, and the local authorities have to work along with social enterprises.