Kevin Marquis, Director, Sustainable Enterprise Strategies

Jul 5 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

He arrived in the North East as a fine art student but found his niche using social enterprise to improve people's prospects in some of the region's most disadvantaged communities. Karen Dent meets Kevin Marquis - political activist, former election agent and director of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES).

IT’S become something of a tradition on General Election night for the eyes of the world to focus on Sunderland for the first seat to declare ... and SES director Kevin Marquis helped to create that international profile which money just can’t buy.

Working as former Sunderland South MP Chris Mullin’s election agent from 1987 until a couple of years ago, 52-year-old Marquis was instrumental in making Sunderland the one to watch.

“I did have a very close working relationship with Bill Crawford who organised the election within the city council,” he says.

“As the election agent, I was legally responsible for the election so I had to make sure that this dash to get the earliest result had to be robust, legitimate and safe.

“I worked with him to make sure that we could get the count done quicker and we had a very clear understanding that at any point on that election night I could pull the plug so he had to make sure that I was comfortable with what was going on.

“Again this year, even though the boundaries have changed, Sunderland delivered the first three results.

“And it is great profile. I’ve got five brothers – one lives in Seattle and one lives in Adelaide – and they saw me in Seattle and Adelaide because it was world news. I was always the person standing behind Chris Mullin when the decision was announced.”

Being an election agent is not, he says, as onerous as people may think. A month’s solid slog ahead of the General Election meant he could run his passion for politics alongside his role of encouraging business start-ups and job creation in some of the poorest parts of the region.

“Often, Chris Mullin was the Government for 15 to 20 minutes – he was the only one elected,” remembers Marquis.

“And I can also claim that me and Chris were the first two people – because the count was so quick – to know the scale of the 1997 landslide. We were sitting at the desk and the count was quick that the piles of ballot papers were piled up and Chris’s were piling up and Chris’s were piling up and Chris’s were piling up – and it wasn’t the fact that Chris’s vote had mushroomed in size, it was the fact that the Tory vote had collapsed.

“We knew very quickly, within literally 20 to 30 minutes what the scale of the vote was in ’97. I’m sure again the coalition Government and other people in political parties will have felt the same at the last election – but I think in ’97 you could smell the desire for change.

“That ’97 election victory was a great day for somebody who had been involved in the party since ’79 and had been through many election defeats and sometimes thought the Labour Party would never get in again – so it was amazing; it was a great feeling.”

Arriving in Sunderland from his home in Leicester in the late 1970s to study fine art, it was Marquis’s community involvement and his own family’s grounding in left-wing politics which set him on the path to using enterprise as a regeneration tool.

“I was brought up in a council estate. My dad worked in the hosiery industry, he used to put socks on metal shoes all day; trade unionism kept him sane,” says Marquis. “He would give his right arm for the job I’m doing. I deliver what interests me which is social benefit.

“One of my brothers was heavily involved in the Labour Party – he was a founder member of the Militant Tendency; they used to meet in my front room in Wigston, Leicester. So I’ve got a very strong, left-wing, socialist tradition – you don’t use that word very often these days.”

Starting off as a volunteer with the East End Citizens’ Rights Centre in Sunderland, he joined SES – then called Sunderland Co-operative Development Agency (SCOERC) – in 1986 and has been with the Hendon-based organisation ever since. He is now its director alongside Mark Saddington.

Despite a boom in co-operative movements in the North East during the 1980s, SES is the only enterprise agency left in the region that grew from those roots.

“Most of the time we’ve been a very small organisation but throughout that, we were increasingly getting experience, knowledge and a reputation and ability to start to engage with people who were the most disadvantaged in the labour market,” says Marquis.

“In the early ’90s, we made the decision we would not just do co-operatives, we would promote enterprise in its wider sense as a tool for regeneration in areas like this. We started to do traditional as well as co-operative business start-ups.

“That was fundamental to us, because it opened up chances of being viable and sustainable. Even though we’re known as a social enterprise organisation, in reality we do more traditional business starts than social enterprise starts.

“Last year, we did 279 starts – 259 were traditional and 20 were social enterprise, but saying that, we are the biggest social enterprise development organisation in the North East.”