David Boyle (1958-2025) was an author and journalist who wrote about history and new ideas in economics, money, business, and culture, who helped develop the concept of co-production.
This is a process by which citizens and other key stakeholders are involved in the design of public services.
Boyle was involved in the Clone Town Britain campaign, helped launch the London Time Bank, and was co-founder of Time Banking UK.
An active member of the Liberal Democrats, he sat on the party’s federal policy committee from 1998 to 2012. He was also a fellow of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a think tank promoting social, economic and environmental justice, which has played a key role in shaping modern co-op ideas in the UK. He edited its publications New Economics, News from the New Economy, and Radical Economics from 1987 to 2010.
Paying tribute on LinkedIn, Ed Mayo, former director general of Co-operatives UK and current CEO at Pilotlight, said: “I am heartbroken to have lost my friend – no that’s not right, I am one of hundreds of people who will be heartbroken to have lost our friend, David Boyle.
“We worked together at New Economics Foundation and collaborated and liaised for long years after. When he came to my big birthday party last year, he brought two of the over 30 books he had written with him as a gift.
“He was a Liberal, both as a lifelong member of the Liberal Democrats but also liberal in a deep way as a profound thinker about how society and the economy could organise in more human-scale and humane ways.
“The book he gave us but never wrote in words was how to live and be with others.”
Josef Davies-Coates, of Community Co-ops Commons, said: “David Boyle was a lovely man. I remember, many moons ago, when Susan Witt was visiting the old NEF offices, and I mentioned to David that I didn’t know who she was, and he said, ‘Oh, you’ve obviously not got to chapter 7 of my book yet’. I was reading his great book Funny Money: In search of alternative cash and Chapter 7 was all about Share Economy, stories that still inspire me.”
