GULBENKIAN FOUNDATION

REPORT

JONATHAN CROALL LETS ACT LOCALLY THE GROWTH OF LOCAL EXCHANGE TRADING SYSTEMS Jonathan Croall has worked in book publishing with Cassell, , Writers and Readers, Bedford Square Press and Penguin. He has been features editor of the Times Educational Supplement, and was editor and co-founder of Arts Express magazine. He is the author of plays, a children’s novel Sent Away, and several books on education, health and arts subjects, on which he writes for a number of national newspapers. He has also written Preserve or Destroy: Tourism and the Environment for the Gulbenkian Foundation. Now editor of the National Theatre’s magazine StageWrite, he is working on a biography of Sir . LETS ACT LOCALLY David Simonds, By the same author

Don’t Shoot the Goalkeeper (OUP) The Parents’ Day School Book (Panther) Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel (Routledge) All the Best, Neill: Letters from Summerhill (Deutsch) Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The People’s Voice 1939-1945 (Hutchinson) Dig for History: Active Learning Across the Curriculum (Southgate) Sent Away (OUP) Helping to Heal: The Arts in Health Care (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) Preserve or Destroy: Tourism and the Environment (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) JO1NATHAN CROALL LETS ACT LOCALLY

THE GROWTH OF LOCAL EXCHANGE TRADING SYSTEMS

CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN FOUNDATION, For my brother Stevie

Published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 98 Portland Place London W1N 4ET Tel: 0171 636 5313

© 1997 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation The right of Jonathan Croall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 0 903319 81 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed by Chris Hyde Printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N5 1JT Distributed by Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd, Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ. Tel: 0181 829 3000 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 6 Introduction 7

1. HISTORY 9 2. PIONEERS AND PRINCIPLES 13 Case study: small town, Stroud 17 3. NUTS AND BOLTS 21 Case study: outer London borough, Hounslow 29 4. THE BENEFITS 33 Case study: Banbridge, Northern Ireland 41 5. THE PROBLEMS 47 Case study: Glasgow, Scotland 56 6. GETTING THE BUSINESS 63 Case study: South Powys, Wales 68 7. LEGAL MATTERS 73 Case study: Beara Peninsula, Republic of Ireland 80 8. HELP FROM OUTSIDE 87 Case study: rural county, Suffolk 93 9. BRANCHING OUT 97 Case study: inner-city suburbs, Manchester 105 10. THE WAY AHEAD 109

Local currency names: a selection 113 Notes 115 Further reading 116 LETS organisations 117 Index 118 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his book was written with the help of a great many people in different parts of the UK and Ireland. I would like to thank all those who were Tgood enough to provide me with the information, ideas and opinions which form its core. Unfortunately there is not space here to mention them all by name. But I would like to single out those who gave me invaluable help with the case- studies, and to thank them for being so generous with their time and hospitality: Anne O’Carroll in Beara, County Cork; Mal and Jenny Neumann in Banbridge, County Down; John Rogers and Tony Care in South Powys; Patrick Boase in Glasgow; Rose Snow, Felicity Glass and Siobhan Harpur in Manchester; Sally Moxon and Simon Raven in Suffolk; Jenny Banfield in Stroud; and David Williams and Sue Shaw in Hounslow. I would also like to thank Liz Shephard for her invaluable help in putting me in touch with many LETS groups in England and Wales, and Lesley Rowan and Mal Neumann for doing the same for Scotland and Northern Ireland. Thanks