It's a community interest company. The directors are all volunteers. The workforce are all volunteers (although volunteering can come with benefits). Of course, a number of these people have their fingers in all sorts of local pies - the treasurer of the village hall may be the vice chair of the allotment association, while the chair of that may be the secretary of something else and so on. Through (a very bad) agreement, the CIC retains all the money made on a particular piece of land the Council owns.
However (and this is why the agreement is very bad), all the costs are bourn by the PC, including the company's admin costs. If the CIC want to put a tearoom in the middle of one of the fields, the PC is expected to pay for the planning permission. If it refuses, the PC and individual councillors are publicly rubbished by members of the company. If a councillor tries to answer the criticisms, they're reported to the monitoring officer, because typically it requires "revealing sensitive information" to do so. The last time this happened, the LA spent £10k investigating what a Councillor put online about the situation and he's been beaten round the head with that £10k figure ever since.
The only purpose for the CIC was to carry out activities the Council couldn't do without power of competence. The Council will be eligible to request power of competence after the election, but this company won't be going anywhere if its people win the vote today. What will happen instead is that the company will be granted more public money to spend on what it wants to make itself money, with all it's decisions being made behind closed doors, while the Council's reserves are bled dry to do all the building/maintenance work (estimated at around £10k/year)
