Small is beautiful – but vulnerable, too

In this age of austerity, short term pressures outweigh long term goals. In the desperate scrabble to protect a service, your income, your job, the struggle is to survive. Longer term ambitions – tackling inequality, climate change, pursuing sustainability – become tempered or even abandoned in the dash for cash. Most vulnerable are the small – the small charities and community groups, the marginal services, the new social enterprises and civically-minded entrepreneurs. They may be beautiful, but these are the people and organisations – as Anna Coote pointed out last week – that will be squeezed and crushed by the big wheels of the Big Society. What are the best strategies for survival? And how can we keep the longer term challenges firmly in view? There are lessons to be learned from some of our most long-standing institutions. Take the Corporation of London, for example. The corporation does not merely represent and serve the interests of the UK's financial district, it also owns and manages more than 10,000 acres of open space in and around London, including the remarkable Epping Forest. Epping Forest is a natural wonder of 21st century London, and is surely an example of 'sustainability' – it has been there since Neolithic times and managed by the corporation for well over a century. Or take the view from King Henry VIII's mound in Richmond Park, across the capital to St Paul's Cathedral. In this case, the Crown owns the land and the Church owns the cathedral, but it's the 'protected view' that is of interest. The protected view – more than 10 miles directly across London – prevents any development above a certain height; and it has been enforced for more than three centuries. If sustainability is about anything, it is about long term success; and this is surely an illustration of that. Turn to examine longevity in the corporate sector, and it appears that most of the world's longest-lasting enterprises are in one of four sectors: agriculture, hospitality, real estate and banking. The common denominator across these examples is the ownership of assets. If you own assets – and if you manage them well – you are not dependent on the largesse of grant makers or the passing vagaries of consumer or government spending. It is also obvious, however, that the Corporation of London, the Crown and the great and ancient business enterprises are hardly democratic institutions. They may, in some instances and to our collective good fortune, have managed some assets very well for a long period of time, but it does not appear to be because we asked them to. For the future – and, given austerity, for now – we need some transfers, of both insights and assets. Handing over assets to small organisations threatened by austerity could help them, by providing a bulwark against the cuts, and could help us, by introducing a little more accountability into the sustainability of our asset management. Introducing some new insights about accountability to the ancient and august could also prove very interesting. David Fell is director of Brook Lyndhurst and editor at London Remade This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Become a Public Leaders Network member to get our weekly update direct to your inbox.