You might not guess it from the well-publicised challenges of Jamie Oliver and his young team at the restaurant Fifteen, but social enterprise is big business in Britain. So big, in fact, that the UK's astonishingly large number of 55,000 social enterprises boast a combined turnover of 27bn a year, according to the Government's Annual Small Business Survey 2005. That means they contribute 8.4bn a year to the UK economy - almost one per cent of annual gross domestic product.
No wonder politicians have been so vocal in their support. Last year, as the Government's Social Enterprise Unit joined the Office of the Third Sector, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown hailed social enterprise "the new British business success story". More recently, Tory leader David Cameron urged even greater ambition "about what we allow social enterprises to do".
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