Trust brings £25m worth of hope

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust, the charity set up to create employment and business opportunities in mining areas, has pumped £25m into a portfolio of investments over the past year.

Those investments have created a business model that will allow the trust to become self-financing by 2016, and no longer reliant on grants.

The trust turned to commercial property after the Government challenged charities to come up with plans to become self-funding in the face of budget cuts as part of the austerity measures.

The cuts were making continuation of programmes by the trust increasingly difficult, and it wanted to create a model that would also allow it to reinvest in former mining towns and villages, creating jobs and opportunities that would inspire enterprise within these communities.

The trust’s property investment director, Shaun O’Brien, said: “We had to meet with the government’s challenge, while also maintaining our values and our objectives.

“Investing in property meant that we could build up a portfolio that would give us an immediate return and also support our longer term plans to show our continued support to the coalfield communities.

“We have purposely chosen properties positioned within coalfield communities so that we can drive the regeneration in these areas.

“We have already started to see some positive changes in the areas we have invested”

The trust, which is the only organisation in the country dedicated to providing coalfield communities with the support they need to help themselves, decided on commercial property because it would deliver an immediate return with many of those purchased benefiting from sitting tenants.

The first investments were made in 2013 with further purchases adding to the portfolio in 2014 and 2015 including a speculative development in Wigan, which will become a trade counter once completed, meeting with the trust’s main objectives to encourage enterprise, growth and hope.

Other investments included No 3 Waterloo Court, Markham Vale, in North Derbyshire, a commercial unit based on a regionally significant 200-acre development offering unrivalled prominence and access to the M1 and a 15,588 sq ft retail warehouse on the busy Sutton Road in Mansfield. 

Working with a number of agents, the trust quickly built up a portfolio of more than 22 buildings with Wigan sitting within the organisation’s property development division and the remaining 21 within the property investments subsidiary.

Mr O’Brien said: “We cannot turn our back on 5.5m people living in the coalfield communities.

“We are the only organisation dedicated to supporting these former mining towns and villages so it is imperative our work continues. We know that through our property portfolio we can carry on and make a real and lasting impact on these areas, many of which are some of the most deprived in the country.”

The extent of that deprivation was starkly illustrated by a report commissioned by the trust from the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. It discovered a range of economic, social and health problems, including higher unemployment rates and fewer available jobs.