Community interest company

So you've got registered providers and housing associations that are regulated and they work with landlords and councils and developers.

And then essentially what happened is five, six years ago, these companies started popping up called CICs.

Community interest companies.

Exactly that.

There's no regulation behind it.

Anybody can do it.

So you then started having some really good CICs pop up who really care about the tenants and the demand.

But then essentially what happened is you got a really bad group of CICs that popped up and there's still 90% of CICs out there in the housing industry.

HMRC has confirmed to ICAEW that unpaid directors, i.e., directors receiving no remuneration or dividends, must complete the close company boxes on the tax return.

An exception has been introduced for unpaid directors of charities and community interest companies, CIC.

See under multiple directorships below.

The statutory basis for HMRC's response would appear to be regulations five B and five EC of the income tax, additional information to be included in returns.

Multiple directorships.

It has been reported that some software packages set a limit, typically eight, on the number of employment pages that can be filed as part of a SA tax return.

On September eighth, 2026, HMRC updated page two of the SA tax return notes, SA150, to clarify that directors of a registered charity or CIC do not need to complete the close company boxes where they did not receive and did not become entitled to receive any employment income or dividend income, including any other type of distribution from that company or any connected company.

Although this clarification is welcome, it does not solve the problem for individuals with multiple directorships in non-charitable close companies such as family companies, groups, or those in the private equity sector.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree because, yeah, having looked into limited company and I have a CIC that's registered with Companies House and all the things that have to go on with that are mind blowing.

It's a

lot more admin being limited, definitely.

well.

Yeah, so I'm getting Derby Cultures helping me get like... start a CIC up kind of thing um and because I'm trained with fun writing and stuff so I can do some of it myself because I work for Derby Theatre as well as volunteer so I've gone through so much training um so yeah I've got an allotment group with six six people who come down so we're just going to grow it from the allotment um to raise awareness so and I got to channel four last week so what

would you want on channel four

um so it was a competition i've seen on instagram and i went through it thinking i wouldn't get it um and they messaged me back straight away put you through yeah so what you

Yeah,

that's it.

Because I'm going to have a CIC eventually.

It's going to be called Spring Forward.

Angus MacDonald, the MP for Skye, spoke out amid growing concerns for the future of the MV Glenachlus, which is reputedly the last manually operated turntable ferry in existence.

Operated by the Isle of Skye Community Interest Company , the ferry service crosses the route between Glenelg on the mainland and Kyle Ray in Skye and employs 22 local people either part or full-time.

However, an agreement with the landowner on the Skye side, Richard Oliphant of That Ilk, Due to the ancient rights to ferry means that the CIC must pay him a percentage of their turnover each year, and a payment can never be less than the previous year.

After a bumper 2025 saw elephant of ilk paid around £10,000, there are concerns that future year's payments could put the ferry service in doubt.

A petition calling for Scottish politicians to step in and change the rules to support this incredible ferry has been signed almost 30,000 times.

The National understands the CIC will take over administration of the petition after it gathered more support than the Sky Local, who set it up, could manage alone.

Lib Dem MP MacDonald said the Glenagh Ferry is both a valuable community resource and a little piece of history on the West Coast.

I hope the Landover could be prevailed upon to recognise that this is not a significant commercial enterprise and extracting an ever increasing toll is not just or practical.

And people are always welcome to let me know about them in the UK because it's not just about the stuff that I do or I talk at.

It's about the community itself, and that's why CIC means Community Interest Company.

I really believe in the occult community.

I really believe in people meeting up and coming to events.

And because I'm not very good at making money, we have decided that we're going to do the one that means we cannot make a profit.

um so we're going to start set this up as a non-profit organization um so i think we're going for a community interest company a cic um which you hadn't really sort of heard of these until i mentioned them or you hadn't sort of looked into it

i was only aware of them because i knew that you have a cic that that happens in the real world um rather than train

people yeah

Yes.

Can you explain a bit more about that?

Well, yeah, you have to have articles of association that are listed and publicly viewable that this community interest company is set up for the express purpose of doing this.

The community it serves is this.

And you've talked about words of advice from the slow ways community.

Where did you go for advice? Where did you need help on things that you didn't know about in terms of making this project happen? One of the things you did was set up a community interest company to oversee it.

Now, did you go for help somewhere to set that up?

Actually, the community interest company, maybe we should have got more advice on that.

But we sort of just used the sort of standard templates that were available.

There's two or three different types of community interest company.

We knew what we had to do was fairly standard.

So actually, we just kind of went for that, actually.