In the West Yorkshire market town of Pudsey, a shopkeeper might ask whether you would like to pay by card, in cash, or in Pudsey pounds.
The Pudsey pound is a paper currency, printed with local scenes, that around ninety local businesses accept as money: pubs, cafés, a dog groomer, a solicitor. It started in mid-2020, the idea of local councillor Trish Smith and the town's business forum, and while other British local currencies have quietly died, this one keeps growing. Roughly 100,000 Pudsey pounds are now in circulation.
What makes it work is not the notes. It is how they get into people's hands.
A lottery that pays out in high-street spending
Shops across the town sell £1 raffle tickets over the counter. Once a month the draw is made live on Facebook, and five winners take a share of the pot: 30, 20, 15, 10 and 5 per cent. The remaining fifth covers running costs and local good causes. Recent pots have passed £1,000.
The twist is that winners are paid in Pudsey pounds, not sterling. The money can only be spent in the town. A winner books a holiday at the local travel agent, treats the family dogs to a groom, or in one case pays a solicitor to write a will they had been putting off.
For the shops it costs nothing. They take the notes at face value and hand them back whenever they like; the scheme's treasurer transfers the same amount in real pounds into their bank account. As Smith puts it: "It costs the businesses nothing. Absolutely nothing."
So a pound spent on a raffle ticket does a lap of the town before it leaves. It is a lottery, a marketing campaign for the high street and a community fund, all running on a raffle drum and a spreadsheet.
Why we wanted to build it
We read about Pudsey and recognised the shape of it immediately. We already had a community currency in hum: mutual credit, where neighbours record favours for each other and no money is involved. The Pudsey pound is its mirror image. Every token is backed by a real pound sitting in a real bank account, and the whole point is to move that money through local shops.
Both answer the same question - how does a place keep its own value circulating? - from opposite ends. So we built the second one, and called it Shop Local.
What the digital version does
Shop Local is now a module any hum community can switch on. It keeps Pudsey's model intact and takes away the paperwork.
The token lives in the app. No notes to print, lose or forge. One token is always worth one unit of the community's own currency, whether that is pounds, New Zealand dollars or euros.
Shops still sell tickets for cash. Staff scan the customer's code, take the cash, and the tickets appear in that person's phone straight away, numbered.
Shops can also sell tokens for cash, like a gift voucher, and accept them as payment by showing a QR code at the till.
Cashing in is instant. A shop taps "cash in" and the scheme owes it that amount, ready for the treasurer's next bank transfer. No counting notes.
The draw is run from the dashboard. The winners are picked the moment the organiser presses the button, then revealed one at a time, lowest prize first, so it still works as a live stream.
The parts that are better on a computer
Pudsey's scheme depends on a volunteer treasurer, a careful spreadsheet and the willingness to be audited. That is the bit that does not scale, and the bit software is genuinely good at.
The books check themselves. Every token in circulation, every penny in this month's pot and every pound promised to good causes has to be covered by cash the scheme has taken in. The float page does that sum continuously and says, in plain words, whether it balances. If it ever does not, the organisers see it immediately rather than at the end of the year.
Nobody has to trust the draw. Winners are picked by the server using cryptographic randomness, and each draw keeps a record: how many tickets were in it, a fingerprint of the exact list, and which position was drawn at each step. A draw cannot be run twice. If someone ever asks whether it was fair, there is an answer rather than an assurance.
Prizes are exact. Each prize is rounded down to the penny, and every leftover penny goes to good causes. A month with fewer tickets than prizes simply has fewer winners, and the unclaimed share goes the same way.
Settling up is a list, not an investigation. Each shop shows one figure: what it owes the scheme from cash it has taken, or what the scheme owes it for tokens cashed in. The treasurer pays or collects, records it, and the figure returns to zero. There is a CSV export for the bank.
What we deliberately kept
It would have been easy to "improve" this into something worse. A few things we left exactly as Pudsey has them:
The shops pay nothing. No fees, no percentage. The scheme exists to move money toward them.
Cash at the counter. Tickets are bought with coins and notes, in person, from a shop. That is what gets people through the door, which is the entire point.
A human presses the button. We could have run the draw automatically at 8pm on the first Tuesday. We didn't. The draw is a moment the town shares, and it should have a person in front of it.
Small stakes. In Pudsey people rarely put in more than a few pounds a month, closer to a tombola at a village fête than to gambling. The defaults reflect that, and shops confirm the buyer's age at the counter.
The serious bit
This is real money, so a scheme like it carries real obligations. In the UK a community lottery normally runs as a small society lottery, registered with the local council: Pudsey's is licensed by Leeds City Council and run by the town's business forum. A digital token that people buy and shops redeem also needs checking against the e-money rules before launch.
The software asks whoever switches Shop Local on to confirm they understand this, and records it. The module stores the lottery licence reference and shows it to members. But the responsibility sits with the community, and we would rather say that plainly than bury it.
Where it is up to
Shop Local is in beta and available now to any hum community, including the free self-serve edition. If you are a business network, a town council or a high-street group wondering whether this could work where you are, we would like to hear from you.
Pudsey proved the idea with a raffle drum and a spreadsheet. We have just made the spreadsheet part easier.