Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the British Heart Foundation shop in Dorchester.

One does sometimes hear people complaining about the number of charity shops in our towns – and I certainly accept that there is a limit to the number of these shops that one can have in a high street without affecting the vibrancy of the shopping experience.

But I’m glad to say that the high street and, indeed, the whole centre of Dorchester (like the centres of Bridport, Lyme Regis and our other towns) is hugely vibrant at present – and there is absolutely no sign of commercial enterprises being squeezed out by charity shops.

Against this background, one can only welcome the contribution that a shop of this kind makes to the exceptionally good cause with which it is associated.

The whole place is run with brisk efficiency by its very tiny team of paid staff and its large group of heroic volunteers – and I was told that this shop alone could contribute as much as £100,000 a year to the invaluable work addressing heart disease in which the British Heart Foundation has specialised over many years.

Looking at the enormous accumulation of items that had been donated for sale, the volunteers carefully sorting and organising these items and imagining all the other stages involved in getting to the final point at which, for example, a child with a serious heart condition is given a new lease of life, one is bound to be struck by the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of some of what we call the “voluntary sector” or “social enterprise”.

Time was, even as I was growing up, when people regularly thought of economic activity as if it consisted exclusively of either “the private sector” or “the public sector”.

What organisations like the British Heart Foundation have shown is that a market economy and a modern democracy can accommodate, and can be hugely enriched by the presence of, an active social market that is neither simply “public” nor “private”.