How CLES uses The Data City to support local economies

Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) is a Manchester-based charity working towards a future where local economies benefit people, place and the planet.

They believe that this will happen when wealth and power serve local people, rather than the other way around, enabling communities to flourish. They have an international reputation for their pioneering work on community wealth building and are recognised as the curators of the movement in the UK.

To support their mission, CLES uses The Data City’s platform to explore the make-up of local business communities and understand how public sector procurement can generate greater economic and social value.

CLES often works with public sector partners to analyse procurement spend, looking at whether and how it can be redirected into local, social economy organisations. This means understanding the supplier base in fine detail: who are the businesses in an area? What do they do? Who do they employ? Are they locally based?

Existing tools provided only part of the picture. What CLES needed was better data on business size, ownership, activity and geography – especially for hard-to-classify companies.

Using The Data City’s platform, CLES accesses detailed company data including turnover, employee estimates and website-derived insights that go beyond outdated SIC codes. This allows them to identify and analyse local suppliers with greater precision.

On projects such as mapping the social economy in the health and life sciences sector across eight London boroughs, The Data City’s tools enabled faster identification of relevant businesses and more informed recommendations to councils.

The platform also plays a critical role in current work with combined authorities, helping analyse procurement spend by sector and flagging opportunities to ‘localise’ supply chains – for example, identifying gaps where local suppliers exist but aren’t currently being engaged.

By using real-time data from The Data City, CLES has been able to identify local suppliers by sector and region, enabling more targeted insights into local economic activity.

This has supported informed recommendations on how public sector spend could better benefit social economy organisations. As a result, councils and combined authorities working with CLES now benefit from sharper, data-led strategies for inclusive economic growth.

CLES continues to use The Data City to drive its mission of building stronger local economies, while also providing valuable feedback, such as the need for more granular company types and ownership visibility, which is helping shape the future of the platform to better serve third sector and policy organisations.