An ocean beyond lotions

Even I have been known to emerge from a shopping centre clutching a little green bag full of smelly things, though they haven't usually been for me. But I can't deny the pervasive influence of Anita Roddick.

The Body Shop, as so many have pointed out this week, showed that business could be done differently. It proved it was possible to use ethics as a selling point, and to appeal simultaneously to customers' needs for self-indulgence and righteous protest.

So it's right that national figures should mourn the passing of a genuine social entrepreneur, an agent of change who enabled others to see that big business doesn't always have to be bad business. It's appropriate that Gordon Brown, one of our foremost evangelists of enterprise, should be among the first to pay tribute.

Yet there are still corners of the UK where a branch of the Body Shop would be as alien as, say, a bookshop or a deli. Or even an old-fashioned greengrocer. There are estates I've visited in recent months in Tyneside, Runcorn and Wigan, where the only local shops are the traditional rows of bookies, takeaways and hairdressers, with the occasional post office. The enterprising people, by and large, are those who have left. And this pattern is still, after ten years of Labour government, replicated endlessly. If the Body Shop had begun in one of these estates rather than a trendy bit of Brighton, it would have bombed.

Gordon Brown told the TUC this week that the route to success is to improve the skills of the UK workforce. He announced a series of measures to encourage workers to become more skilled and to take up job opportunities. In doing so he was building on the welfare reform green paper, In work, better off, which sets out plans to move towards an 80% employment rate, expand the Pathways to Work initiative nationwide and ratchet up the carrot-and-stick approach to economic activity.

On a macro level, this all makes sense. There are 600,000 vacancies in the labour market every month, yet there are still 'concentrations of worklessness'. At street level, it's a bit different. Many of our concentrations of deprivation have been created through housing policies that have made social renting the tenure of last resort and have shoe-horned those with the greatest needs into the worst accommodation, and left them to it. It will take more than a few local economic partnerships offering jobs with Asda and McDonalds to tackle that legacy.

That's why neighbourhood action must accompany action on skills. Work is worthwhile if you're coming home to a place you like and feel secure in; the neighbourhood improves if residents feel confident enough to improve their living standards. The glue that holds this together is to have organisations that are rooted locally, have credibility with local people and can offer both inspiration and support. There are many community-based bodies that do that, often against the odds. Jobcentre Plus, with the best will in the world, won't.