I have a particular bee on about Oxford City Council's Leisure Services. For as long as I can remember they've been more or less crap. I don't mean the staff, though there have been some problems there as well, I mean what they are given to work with - the leisure facilities. Crumbling roofs here, ivy growing through the walls there, and all, or nearly all, well beyond their designed lifespan.

Seven years ago now I tried to get the ball rolling towards creating a structure that would take the leisure centres out from under the skirts of the City Council where they have to wait patiently in line for precious budget allocations never allowing them to do much more than patch up the broken bits and certainly never enough to allow them to compete in an increasingly sophisticated leisure market.

So it's a bit galling to hear yet again a phrase to which I rather object. According to an article in today's Oxford Mail again: Leisure Services Could Be Privatised. Actually it's not the word privatised I object to, but the phrase used by turncoat independent councillor, Paul Sargent, whose opinion the Oxford Mail seems to think is still worth canvassing, that it should be a "not for profit trust" (the phrase has common currency in the Lib Dem group he welched on, so it's not just Sargent I'm complaining about here).

Now I understand why they use such a phrase. Back in 2002 Labour campaigners shamelessly lied in material put out against me in the ward I was standing in denouncing that we were set to "privatise" the Leisure Centres in the form of a co-operative I had proposed (so annoying for a party so closely linked to the co-operative movement that they didn't understand the concept!) A "not for profit trust" is meant to convey something that doesn't operate as a cut-throat business that it's a trust which will involve some public input so the council aren't handing everything away, and so on.

But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of social enterprise. Like any business, by definition if it's not making a profit it's making a loss. A loss means, in the case of a service the council wants to see continue, subsidy. And then you're back to square one - waiting for handouts amongst all the other spending priorities of a council and managing slow decline as you never get quite what you need.

No, the difference between an "ordinary company" and a social enterprise is that a company is there to maximise value for its shareholders - to make as much profit as it is able - while a social enterprise may have more aims, involving benefits other than mere profit. Many will of course have in their rules that they will never distribute profits to any shareholders - as in dividends - that profits will be used to fulfill other aims, but to do so it has to function as a solvent business with a positive cash flow that can be used for such aims.

So anyway, now we have that established - profit is not a dirty word. It's what enables you to deliver on your other aims. In social enterprise circles the favoured phrase nowadays is "more than profit". So the choice the city seems to be faced with is whether they want the Leisure Centres to operate as a private enterprise or as a social enterprise. Well, not quite. There's another variation that I would encourage the City Council to look into: the Open Capital Partnership.

The Open Capital Partnership is quite a new idea. In response to fears (such as became apparent when Arthur Anderson were held liable for Enron irregularities) that traditional British partnerships, such as used by legal, accounting and other professional firms, meant that all their partners were individually liable to an unlimited extent for any debts of the whole partnership - they could lose everything they owned ultimately - the government created a new business structure, the Limited Liability Partnership (you'll see "LLP" after the names of law firms and so on).

Like a traditional partnership they are very flexible, particularly as regards membership - anyone can be made a partner, not just people who put money in or buy shares in a company and like a company, the partners' liability is limited to what they put into the partnership. And there are other differences - such as tax arrangements - but for this purpose it is the structure that's important.

In Leisure Services, for example, the City Council could be a partner, contributing the sites (not necessarily the buildings if they are to be rebuilt), some investors contribute their cash to develop the sites. Both, in normal circumstances, would probably expect to get paid for their contribution - rent for the sites and rent for the capital. Though in this case where the City Council is providing the land or buildings in order to deliver a service they would previously have funded (and in the case of Leisure Centres at a cost of £3.5m per year to the taxpayer) they might waive that rent as its contribution to the service.

The staff and management could be partners, as could the customers or users of the facilities, providers of other services - say the county council contributing its school playing fields, or colleges contributing their sports facilities, or perhaps, on occasion, a private operator whom you want to contract to provide some part of the overall leisure services package. But the capital investor does not take ownership or have a charge on assets of the partnership such as with a company or a loan arrangement, and cannot act to the exclusion of the other partners.

Partners over time can change the type of partner they are, or be in more than one category - a user may wish to buy some of the capital rent entitlement - imagine it an investment similar to an undated index linked bond - it would be particularly apt for a pension fund investment for example. As I say, one of the consummate benefits is the flexibility of the structure. The City Council does not lose ownership of its current assets, they get huge investment in the service and a place on the board. The management and staff are enthused to plan, build and maintain a highly professional leisure business that seeks to do well financially in order to fund its other aims. Users are valued as co-owners of the business and take a more direct interest in the services offered.

As an illustration, if you were to set the capital rent payable to the partners who put in the development capital (I won't call it "lend" for a variety of reasons but it's a similar process) at an index-linked 4% and the city council were not going to take rent for the current leisure estate, the money the city already puts into these services each year, some £3.5million in revenue financing currently, could be used to pay the capital rent on some £87m worth of investment - certainly enough to rebuild what they've got and provide that Olympic swimming pool if you really need to!).

As a structure it has it all. The capitalist cannot take control, the council does not lose its assets, it can raise money, without putting the buildings in hock to a traditional lender. It could provide a vehicle for a wider ranging partnership with other providers of leisure facilities in the city - at long last helping to bring into more public use some of those social assets, school playing fields and university facilities, for example, that are currently exclusive or closed when the community wants to be able to use them.

Out of interest, this is the same partnership model as I am proposing for housing stock improvement, for the Town Hall development, and for supporting locally owned businesses through rental partnerships on City Council owned commercial properties.

Incidentally, as an aside, I realise that Olympic swimming has always been in 50m pools, but when Oxford University was going for planning consent to build its new pool on the Iffley Rd site I specifically asked of them (I was on planning committee at the time) if they couldn't try and fit in an Olympic sized pool and the university sports office definitely responded to the effect that Olympic sized pools were going to be reduced to the more common 25m length so they didn't need to. What, if anything, happened to that?