The Community Interest Company

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the success of the development of the Community Interest Company (CIC). The CIC corporate form was created in 2005, designed with an asset lock to prevent successful charitable social enterprises becoming corporate targets. In practice many people have still not heard about CICs, and the original observations in this paper are intended to aid the understanding of CICs development by both practitioners and academics. Written principally from a practitioner's perspective, the paper is empirical in nature, presenting reasons for the subsequent legislative changes to this type of UK social business in 2009, 2012 and 2014 and providing an analysis of aspects of CIC reporting, as filed in CIC annual reports and in the Companies House 2017 dataset. It is intended, in part, to address the lack of generally available literature informing practitioners about the existence and potential use of the CIC corporate form, either as a Company Limited by Shares, CLS, or a Company Limited by Guarantee, CLG, by social entrepreneurs seeking to incorporate UK social business enterprises at Companies House.<br/> For the practitioner, it communicates findings about the CIC form in the context of the original legislation in 2005, with an overview of the regulatory changes that sought improvements to CIC reporting, actioned the removal of one of the dividend caps and relaxed the asset lock. It further indicates the preference for the CIC form of Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG), highlights that few CICs (2%) have achieved the status of large companies, and that there is little published about the financial success or otherwise of CICs. The CIC corporate form, with the inbuilt asset lock, is becoming an accepted corporate model in practice and its potential for use as a corporate raid dis-incentive is not limited to charitable organisations. For the academic, this work indicates certain gaps, and consequently areas for further research, in the role of CICs in business theory models, in regional variations, and importantly, in their financial success.<br/> The research is limited to the UK and does not consider international social enterprises and associated legislation.