July 2017

JULY 2017
news
INCLUSION
Steps businesses
take to include
communities
Plus ... Democracy at
Grenfell ... A year after
the Cloverleaf rebrand
... The strategy for co-op
development
ISSN 0009-9821
9 770009 982010
01
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CONNECTING, CHAMPIONING AND
CHALLENGING THE GLOBAL CO-OP
MOVEMENT SINCE 1871
Holyoake House, Hanover Street,
Manchester M60 0AS
(00) 44 161 214 0870
www.thenews.coop
editorial@thenews.coop
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Anthony Murray
anthony@thenews.coop
DEPUTY EDITOR
Rebecca Harvey
rebecca@thenews.coop
EDITORIAL
Anca Voinea | anca@thenews.coop
Miles Hadfield | miles@thenews.coop
DIRECTORS
Elaine Dean (chair), David Paterson
(vice-chair), Richard Bickle, Sofygil
Crew, Gavin Ewing, Tim Hartley,
Erskine Holmes, Beverley Perkins and
Barbara Rainford.
Secretary: Ray Henderson
Established in 1871, Co-operative News
is published by Co-operative Press Ltd,
a registered society under the Cooperative
and Community Benefit Society
Act 2014. It is printed every month by
Buxton Press, Palace Road, Buxton,
Derbyshire SK17 6AE. Membership of
Co-operative Press is open to individual
readers as well as to other co-operatives,
corporate bodies and unincorporated
organisations.
The Co-operative News mission statement
is to connect, champion and challenge
the global co-operative movement,
through fair and objective journalism and
open and honest comment and debate.
Co-op News is, on occasion, supported by
co-operatives, but final editorial control
remains with Co-operative News unless
specifically labelled ‘advertorial’. The
information and views set out in opinion
articles and letters do not necessarily
reflect the opinion of Co-operative News.
@coopnews
news
cooperativenews
Welcome, join us,
co-operatives are open for all
“We do not leave anybody behind.” If there’s a slogan that encompasses
the values that co-operatives adhere to, then that could be a contender.
All seven co-op principles revolve around the need to be inclusive and to
serve the members of our co-operative community.
So it’s no surprise that ‘inclusion’ is this year’s theme for the International
Day of Co-operatives. “It is good to remember that solutions for inequality
exist,” says the International Co-operative Alliance.
Co-operatives are not just open for business, they are an open business. A
business that is open for being democratically controlled and transparent
in its dealings. “Open membership affords access to wealth creation and
poverty elimination,” says the Alliance.
For the International Day (1 July), the Alliance calls on co-operatives to
reflect on the misery caused by rising inequality, to recommit to ensuring
equality across their communities, and to celebrate the co-operative
contribution to making the world a better place.
In this edition, we feature some of those co-ops that leave no one behind,
such as the support of small producers by East of England Co-op, how
the Wales Co-operative Centre promotes inclusion through housing, the
ex-prisoners’ co-op that helps people back on their feet and the work of
Singapore’s healthcare system to support an ageing population.
Co-operatives are open, for all.
ANTHONY MURRAY - EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Inside this edition, you will find the annual members
update the performance of your Co-op News. If this did
not reach you or you want to read more, please visit:
thenews.coop/performance
JULY 2017 | 3

Grenfell ... A year after
the Cloverleaf rebrand
... The strategy for co-op
development
ISSN 0009-9821
01
9 770009 982010
THIS ISSUE
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT
Deb Oxley, chief executive of the Employee
Ownership Association, talks about her
role (p24-25) and discusses the future of
the model (p41-43); Celebrating 50 years
of India’s IFFCO (p16); The Big Debate: how
Lincolnshire Co-operative is supporting local
libraries (p34-37); and Grenfell: structure and
accountability (p26-27).
news Issue #7285 JULY 2017
Connecting, championing, challenging
news
JULY 2017
INCLUSION
Steps businesses
take to include
communities
Plus ... Democracy at
£4.20
www.thenews.coop
COVER: For the International
Day of Co-operatives, we look at
some of the co-ops working to
ensure no one gets left behind.
At East of England, one of the
ways this is done is by supporting
local producers – including Sue
Whitehead and Rebecca Miles
at Lane Farm – through the
Sourced Locally scheme, which is
celebrating its 10th anniversary
Read more: p30-33
Photo: Jenny Lewis
Make-up/hair: Margo Holder
14-15 OBITUARY: ROBIN MURRAY
Co-operatives UK’s Ed Mayo pays tribute
to a visionary co-operator, radical
economist and Fairtrade pioneer
23 OPINION
Greenbelt: Why the festival is such a good
match for the co-op movement
24-25 MEET… DEB OXLEY
The chief executive of the Employee
Ownership Association talks about the
challenges of her role – and getting the
model recognised
26-27 GRENFELL
‘Why should people have to put up with
organisations more interested in profit
than in housing them safely?’
28-29 ENERGY
Paul Monaghan, sustainability adviser
to Co-operative Energy, reports from
the General Assembly of REScoop – the
European federation of renewable energy
co-operatives
30-33 INTERNATIONAL DAY OF
CO-OPERATIVES
How co-operatives ensure that no one is
left behind
34-37 THE CO-OP NEWS BIG DEBATE
The co-operatives showing concern for
local communities
38-39 THE NATIONAL CO-OPERATIVE
DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
Dame Pauline Green introduces the
strategy
41-43 EMPLOYEE OWNERSHP
The business model of the future?
44-45 CO-OPERATIVE BRANDING
What’s happening a year after the
Cloverleaf rebrand?
46-47 NISA BUYOUT
The bidding war between the
Co-operative Group and Sainsbury’s
REGULARS
6-13: UK updates
16-21: Global updates
22: Letters
48-49: Reviews
50: Diary
4 | JULY 2017

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NEWS
CO-OP ECONOMY
The annual co-op report: finances remain steady, while membership grows
Co-operatives have shown resilience over
the past year, according to the annual
report on the sector.
Co-operatives UK’s 2017 Co-operative
Economy report reveals the UK’s co-op
economy has a collective turnover of
£35.7bn – in line with previous years.
The sector includes 13.6 million active
members and 226,000 employees. Over
700,000 new members joined co-ops last
year, driven by a 600,000 membership
increase at the Co-op Group, the UK’s
largest customer-owned business. The
largest co-operative on the list is the
employee-owned John Lewis Partnership
with a turnover of £10bn. The Co-op Group
comes second with £9.47bn.
Ed Mayo, secretary general of Cooperatives
UK, said: “Underlying
the political shocks the country has
experienced over the last year is a call
from many parts of the UK population for
an economy over which they have more of
a say and from which they get a fair share.
“As organisations owned by 13.6 million
people, the UK’s 7,000 co-ops give people
a say in what they do and how their profits
are used. They offer a practical way to
reimagine an economy in which people
have more control over their homes, work
and local areas.
“It’s no surprise we’re seeing a spike
in interest in co-ops, whether it’s social
care providers finding that a co-operative
approach can give its users and workers
a voice, or young designers and web
developers seeing co-ops as a natural way
to collaborate at work.”
The co-operative retail sector has also
shown strong results, with a total turnover
of £25bn last year, an increase of £580m
or 2.5% from the previous year. The report
points out that 50% of the customer-owned
retailers are investing twice as much of
their profit in local areas compared to their
competitors.
Steve Murrells, chief executive of the
Co-op Group, said: “It’s testament to the
strength and relevance of the co-operative
model that we see such a positive report on
our sector, especially when set against the
background of a climate of economic and
political uncertainty.
“Co-ops are about making society a better
place to be. That’s been our role since we
were founded, and it’s our responsibility to
carry that forward.”
CO-OPERATIVE CONGRESS
Movement meets to discuss the gig economy and communities in crisis
The national co-op movement holds its
annual gathering on 30 June – 1 July, to
look at how “to reimagine our work, our
housing, our local communities”.
Co-operative Congress 2017 takes place
at Unity Works, Wakefield and will include
a look at the challenges posed to workers
by the gig economy.
Organised by Co-operatives UK, the
programme features panel discussions,
workshops and co-op advice surgeries.
The weekend also sees Co-op Press,
publishers of the News, hold its AGM at
the Unity Works, at 1.30pm on Friday,
30 June. After this, at 2.30pm, the News
hosts its event Big Debate: Caring for the
community in the face of crisis (read more
on page 34).
The debate will look at the various
roles co-operatives play in caring for the
community, from providing the tools to be
more self-reliant through to intervention.
Speakers include Jane Avery, CASE; Karen
Wilkie, Co-operative Party; and Dr Kathrin
Luddecke, Plunkett Foundation.
At Congress itself, keynote speakers
will look at the gig economy and the
changing nature of work. John Park, from
Community – a trade union for the selfemployed
– will discuss the fight for the
rights of growing number of freelancers in
the face of job insecurity.
Sarah de Heusch, from SMart, will
talk about her finance mutual, based in
Belgium, which provides security to more
than 60,000 freelancers.
A panel discussion will look at how
to transform the economy in a way that
shares power and wealth more widely,
and how co-operation can help tackle
problems related to inequality, land,
housing, jobs and public services.
Facilitated by Baroness Glenys
Thornton, chief executive of the Young
Foundation, the debate features Rachel
6 | JULY 2017

In the freelance sector, over 118,000
workers and freelancers are members of
co-ops. According to the report, more and
more young people are also considering
co-op models in creative industries. Last
year saw a 28% increase in the number
of start-ups among digital and arts
organisations, accounting for just over 10%
of all co-op start-ups over the year.
Overall, worker co-ops had a turnover
of £10.7bn, an increase of £0.2bn from the
previous year.
Farming is the second largest industry
in the co-operative economy. Last year
the country’s 436 farming co-ops, which
are owned by 152,000 farmers turned over
£7.4bn, a decrease from £7.8bn.
The report also identifies ways in
which farmer co-ops are adding value
to their members’ products, with dairy
co-operatives like Arla and the Organic
Milk Suppliers Co-operative developing
new products and brands, and exporting
to international markets.
The total turnover of UK co-ops for 2016
has been amended from £34bn to £35.7bn
after Co-operatives UK received additional
data from other co-operatives. This year’s
report is also reporting the number of
active members in co-ops, rather than the
total number of members, used in previous
reports.
u Read the full results online at
reports.uk.coop/economy2017
Co-operative
Turnover
John Lewis Partnership £10,026,200,000
Co-op Group £9,472,000,000
Arla Foods UK £2,158,000,000
National Merchant Buying Society £1,393,830,000
The Midcounties Co-operative £979,232,000
Central England Co-operative £805,769,000
Openfield Group £710,399,000
Fane Valley Co-operative Society £476,148,000
Mole Valley Farmers £422,119,000
Dale Farm Co-operative £421,482,000
The Southern Co-operative £393,823,000
Scottish Midland Co-operative Society £376,169,000
East of England Co-operative Society £347,709,000
First Milk £294,232,000
Berry Garden Growers £278,913,000
Lincolnshire Co-operative £278,330,000
Berryworld £233,639,000
Anglia Farmers £230,917,748
The Housing Finance Corporation £225,216,000
Greenwich Leisure £215,000,000
Lawrence, from the New Economics
Foundation; Andy Wightman, Scottish
Green Party MSP and land reform activist;
and Ibon Zugasti, international projects
manager at Mondragon Corporation.
And Ed Mayo, secretary general of
Co-operatives UK, will launch “Do it
ourselves” – a strategy to strengthen and
grow the UK’s co-operatives.
There will also be plenty of networking
opportunities and a chance to pitch your
big co-op idea at a Dragons’s Den-style
event, with £2,000 cash and £2,000 worth
of mentor support up for grabs for the best
ideas for new co-ops, or new products/
services for existing co-ops.
The winners of the 2017 co-operatives
of the year award will also be announced.
JULY 2017 | 7

DEVELOPMENT
The Phone Co-op
launches Foundation for
Co-operative Innovation
The Phone Co-op has announced the
launch of a new initiative designed to
“help drive the development of a more
vibrant co-operative economy”.
The Foundation for Co-operative
Innovation aims to become a focal
point for the wider co-op movement,
complementing and supporting
Co-operatives UK’s National Co-operative
Development Strategy.
It will be led by Vivian Woodell, who
has stepped down as the Phone Co-op’s
chief executive to take the role.
“At the Phone Co-op, we set out to
demonstrate that a co-operative business
can be successful because of its values
and because it does business differently
from its competitors in the private sector,”
said Mr Woodell. “Our success proves this
is possible. My colleagues are an excellent
team with great strengths and strong
co-operative commitment.
“It has been a privilege to work with
them all. I know that the Phone Co-op
will continue to flourish in the future,
building on those same principles and I
am meanwhile delighted to be leading the
launch of the Foundation, which I believe
will be able to make a real difference,
supporting new co-operative solutions.”
The idea for the Foundation evolved
out of a series of other thoughts, says Mr
Woodell, who will be working on the form
and structure of the new enterprise over
the next few months. The aim, he adds, is
for it to be a vehicle for a means to an end,
not an end in itself.
“A number of times I’ve sat with
co-operators and people have said
p Vivian Woodell is stepping down as chief executive of the Phone Co-op to lead the
development of the organisation’s new Foundation for Co-operative Innovation
‘wouldn’t it be great if a co-operative did
X, Y or Z’,” he said. “But it doesn’t happen
because you need someone to grab the
idea by the scruff of the neck. If there’s
one difference the foundation can make it
will be to galvanise that.”
The Phone Co-op, which was founded
in 1998, has put a lot of resources into
its Co-operative & Social Economy
Development Fund to support the growth
and development of other co-ops and
social enterprises around the country. It
has been particularly active in the green
energy and student housing sectors.
“The Foundation will take this to
the next level,” says Mr Woodell. “I’m
looking forward to tackling some
interesting challenges in terms of strategic
co-operative development.”
The Foundation, which aims to be up
and running by the end of the year, will
be a separate organisation from the Phone
Co-op, but will remain close, .
There will also be some form of
representation from the Phone Co-op in
the governance, although the final form
has yet to be decided.
The Phone Co-op’s board has announced
that Peter Murley, a Phone Co-op member
who has significant telecoms experience,
will act as interim chief executive.
Robert Denbeigh, chair of the Phone
Co-op, said: “The Phone Co-op is a huge
success story. Its achievement in securing
19 years of profitable growth is something
of which we are all very proud.
“No other consumer co-operative
launched in the UK in the last 50 years has
achieved this. The Phone Co-op has won
many awards and is widely recognised in
the co-operative movement, nationally
and internationally as an example of
a successful, innovative co-operative
business.
“The board expresses heartfelt thanks
to Vivian for his vision in starting the
Phone Co-op and for his work in getting it
to where it is now. We know he will bring
the same energy and imagination to his
new role.”
DEVELOPMENT
Northern Ireland
co-operative survey
To mark the launch of Co-operatives
Fortnight, Co-operative Alternatives
has launched the Northern Ireland
Co-operative Survey to gather information
about the movement in Northern Ireland.
It will include questions on awareness
and membership of co-ops and ask
whether local people buy co-operative
products or services.
“It’s an exciting time here,” said Tiziana
O’Hara (right) of Co-operative Alternatives,
Northern Ireland’s leading co-operative
development agency. “This survey will
help us to have a better understanding
of how people feel about co-ops and will
give us an insight into new conversations
for the future.”
u Take the survey at s.coop/25vlf
8 | JULY 2017

RETAIL
The Small Things making a Big Difference at East of England
East of England Co-operative has launched
a new initiative celebrating the small things
that make a big difference to its members,
customers and colleagues.
The ‘Small Things, Big Difference’
campaign will share stories to communicate
co-operation in “modern, relevant ways”,
says joint chief executive Minnie Moll. The
aim is for members to feel proud of being a
part of the organisation.
“Like many co-ops, we find it surprisingly
challenging to explain what’s different and
better about co-operatives,” says Ms Moll.
“There’s an old marketing fable about
‘selling the sizzle, not the sausage’ – the
notion of looking at the benefits rather
than the features. Part of the leap for us was
thinking about what we do that makes life
better for a person.
“But it’s not just one thing – the way our
co-op is different and better is through lots
of different things, and some of them are
really quite small. But add them all together
and you can see the difference.”
East of England has been serving the
people and communities of Essex, Suffolk
and Norfolk for over 150 years, and operates
on the belief that ‘it is possible to balance
success and doing well with doing the right
p East of England’s joint chief executives –
Minnie Moll, Doug Field, Nick Denny, Mark
O’Hagan and Roger Grosvenor – launching
the Small Things, Big Difference campaign
u Scott Walker, East of England’s
Anti-Social Behaviour Support Officer, with
St Alban’s High School’s Melody Bradley
and the winners of the anti-social behaviour
poster competition
thing and giving back’. In developing the
campaign, the society wanted “a big idea”
that powerfully engaged colleagues.
“To a great extent, it’s our colleagues
that deliver the big difference every day,”
says Ms Moll.
“The minute we got the ‘Small Things,
Big Difference’ line, we moved on to
the question: how are we going to tell
the stories? The answer? Let’s feature
colleagues, make heroes of them,
photograph them, tell their stories.”
The stories gathered so far feature
a diverse cross section of the region’s
communities.
There’s the story of colleagues in one
store who used their Christmas celebration
money to send a colleague, diagnosed with
cancer, to a health spa. There’s another
colleague in Travel who helped arrange a
couple’s honeymoon to Australia in her
own time in the middle of the night, due
to the time difference. And there’s the
community work done, from installing
defibrillators and helping retired police
dogs, to supplying local causes with a free
regular or one-off supply of Co-operative
Fairtrade 99 Tea.
“One of my favourite stories is about
Scott Walker in our security team – a
tough looking guy who is our anti-social
behaviour support officer,” says Ms Moll.
“One of our stores was having issues with
anti-social behaviour so, off his own back,
Scott went into the local school and ran
a series of assemblies and enrichment
classes, talking directly to students about
the severity and consequences of antisocial
behaviour in their community. He
also ran a competition to design a poster for
East of England Co-op stores to deter antisocial
behaviour.
“He did some amazing work and without
question this reduced anti-social behaviour
in the area.”
By telling these stories on the record, the
society hopes to demonstrate how it makes
a difference – and believes the campaign
will run and run as there will always be
different stories to tell.

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP
National inquiry launched to assess the impact of employee ownership
The Employee Ownership Association
(EOA) has launched a national inquiry into
the performance of UK employee-owned
businesses, including worker co-ops.
The Ownership Effect Inquiry is led by the
EOA, in partnership with the eaga Trust and
John Lewis Partnership, with support from
Cass and Manchester Business Schools. As
part of the study, an independent panel of
experts from business, finance, accounting
and management, who are not currently
close to employee ownership, will receive
oral and written evidence from industry
experts, advisers and employee-owned
business leaders.
The panel, chaired by Baroness Bowles
of Berkhamsted, is also accepting written
evidence. The findings, conclusions and
recommendations will be published this
autumn in a comprehensive report focused
on the potential of employee-ownership
and its contribution to UK productivity
growth and corporate behaviour.
Deb Oxley, chief executive of the EOA,
said: “The UK employee ownership sector
has a combined turnover of between £30-
40bn annually, yet time and again it is
overlooked in key government publications,
such as the recent Industrial Strategy.
“We believe the government must look
to employee ownership as a model that can
p Deb Oxley, CEO of the EOA; Richard Marr, chief operating officer of the eaga Trust; inquiry
chair Baroness Sharon Bowles; and Simon Fowler, director of communications at John Lewis
deliver more for the economy, so there has
never been a better time to gather a solid
body of evidence to drive this aim forward.”
Richard Marr of the eaga Trust said there
was clear evidence that the employeeowned
sector was growing, but also a lack
of awareness and understanding of its
contribution to the economy.
He said: “The eaga Trust is dedicated to
championing the sector to generate more
investment and support its growth, so we
are delighted to play a key role as a project
partner in this important inquiry.”
John Lewis Partnership, which
supports the initiative, is the UK’s largest
employee-owned business. Its director
of communications, Simon Fowler, said:
“There is increasing evidence to show
that employee-owned companies are more
productive, resilient, and profitable longterm,
and that people who work for them
achieve higher levels of wellbeing.
“We are delighted to give our full backing
to the Ownership Effect Inquiry, and we
look forward to the first hearings.”
u Meet... Deb Oxley, chief executive of
the EOA. p.24
u Employee Ownership: The business
model of the future? p.42
CREDIT UNIONS
John Lewis backs new credit union to protect workers from payday lenders
Worker-owned retailer John Lewis has
joined with other retailers to back a new
credit union to help store workers avoid
payday lenders.
The new venture, retailCURe, works
in association the retailTRUST, a charity
formed to help involved workers and exworkers
in retail and related industries.
It aims to build a co-operative business
that will be the preferred financial
services provider for employees of UK
retail businesses.
Joining John Lewis in backing the
credit union are high street names such as
Debenhams, Iceland, New Look and Pets
at Home.
Former Dragons’ Den star Theo Paphitis
has said that he and his companies have
invested a six-figure sum in the not-forprofit
enterprise.
Membership of retailCURe is open to any
of the 4.5 million people aged 16 or over
who work in retail or a support industry – a
sector which has a large number of workers
on low pay.
The problem was highlighted in 2014
when retailTRUST identified mounting
concerns among retailers about the
number of employees reporting financial
difficulties. RetailCURE was devised in
response, and in September 2016 the credit
union received final authorisations from
the Prudential Regulatory Authority and
the Financial Conduct Authority.
It is now fully active in offering savings
and loans via its website and mobile apps.
10 | JULY 2017

Central Bank of Ireland consults on credit union rules
The Central Bank of Ireland has just
completed a consultation on proposals
to widen the range of investments open
to the credit union sector. This could
include additional types of bonds, social
housing and state projects. Investments
are particularly important to credit unions
due to their low loan-to-asset ratio.
SUSTAINABILITY
Midcounties awarded
top rating in BITC’s
2017 Corporate
Responsibility Index
The Midcounties Co-operative has
achieved a 5 star rating in Business in the
Community’s (BITC) annual Corporate
Responsibility (CR) Index.
The Index measures how businesses are
integrating responsible business practice
into all aspects of their operations.
Midcounties scored a record 100%, and
was praised for excellent practices in
sustainability, community engagement
and high standards of governance.
The society was recognised for its
long-term investments to improve
sustainability. Its retail stores are
powered entirely by green energy, while
Co-operative Energy purchases over 45%
of energy from renewable sources. The
society has also increased its recycling
levels to 91% – and its own food waste
recycling produces enough renewable
energy to power 40 homes a year.
“As the largest independent co-operative
in the UK we’re an ambitious business
built on the strong ethical principles that
guide co-operatives all over the globe,”
said Pete Westall, group general manager
– colleague and co-operative service.
“We also work globally through the
International Co-operative Alliance
to ensure we’re at the forefront of the
international co-operative movement and
champion the co-op model.
“This award recognises the way our
members, colleagues and customers have
come together to help us achieve this. It’s
a clear badge showing our commitment to
responsible business practices, and one
that we’re proud to wear.”
Co-operative women’s football team calls for players
A co-operative women’s football team is
being set up to enter the Freedom Through
Football tournament, which promotes
inclusion and ethical football. Jane
Turner, a member of Suma Wholefoods,
and Rowan Powell, a member and senior
designer at Calverts, hope the team will
debut at a Dorset tournament this month.
Leeds community pub bid loses out to rival buyer
A bid to buy a historic pub in Leeds city
centre has failed after a sale was agreed
to a rival brewer. Locals had launched a
£300,000 funding bid to buy the Cardigan
Arms, which is valued for its original
fixtures, and run it as a community pub,
but owner Greene King has accepted a
sale to Kirkstall Brewery owner Steve Holt.
Channel Islands Co-op rewards charitable colleagues
Two colleagues from the Channel Islands
Co-op were named Ambassadors of
the Year for their volunteer work with
EYECAN, a local sight-impairment charity.
The co-op gave Joaquim Santos and James
Birch a cheque for £250 and a bottle of
champagne each, along with a cheque for
£1,000 for EYECAN.
Co-op Legal Services raises funds for Cancer Research
Co-op Legal Services, part of the Co-op
Group, has launched a new partnership
with Cancer Research UK, aiming to raise
over £750,000. The campaign, ‘A Will 2
Tackle Cancer’, will raise funds for the
charity’s work on prevention, diagnosis
and treatment through a range of estate
planning packages .
JULY 2017 | 11

RETAIL
Elaine Dean elected Central England president
Elaine Dean, a lifelong co-operator, has
been named as the new president of
Central England Co-operative after being
elected unanimously.
She will now chair the board of
directors, ensuring the society carries
out its commitment to be a successful
co-operative business and to serve the
best interests of its members.
“I am so proud to have been elected
as president and I am looking forward
to helping to continue our work as a
strong, independent, and successful
society,” she said.
Ms Dean has been a member of the
society for 50 years. “I had my name
down for a small share number at the
former Derby Society for many months
beforehand and was allocated 266.
Membership was a 16th birthday gift from
my parents,” she said.
“My family imbued me with a passion
for this business model as a way of
working together. Collectively, my family
has around 230 years’ service to the
former Derby Co-op.”
Derby Co-op merged with a number
of regional societies to form the Central
Midlands Co-operative Society in 1985,
which itself merged with Anglia in 2014 to
become Central England.
Ms Dean, who is a member of seven
co-ops, and is chair of Co-operative Press,
was first elected to the former Derby
Co-op in 1980, when she was seven months
pregnant, and has been continuously
elected ever since.
“At the end of this term of office it
will be 40 years but my passion and
enthusiasm remains undiminished,”
she said. “I want to lead by enthusiastic
example and put Central England at
the forefront of the national movement
by more participation in the wider
co-operative world and by doing the most
co-oppy things in the most co-oppy way,
so that we are a shining example of how a
co-operative should be.”
She believes that people, and the
movement’s values and principles, should
be at the forefront of all a co-op represents.
“I am proud of Central England’s
relationships with members and all
the work we do with members from
educational visits to groups, classes,
events and activities that continue all
year round,” she said. “We have a sound
engagement which engenders loyalty.
“Historically I was also extremely proud
back in the late 70s/early 80s when we
supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement
in boycotting South African goods.”
Ms Dean will be supported in her role by
Maria Lee who was elected as the society’s
new vice-president. Paul Singh was also
re-elected to serve on the board and Sean
Clothier was re-elected unopposed as an
employee director. All positions are for a
three-year term.
“Elaine, Maria and their fellow directors
will continue to work closely with our
chief executive Martyn Cheatle and his
team in pursuit of our vision to be the UK’s
best consumer co-operative society by
making a real difference to our members
and our communities,” said Jim Watts,
society secretary.
“We wish them every success in their
new roles.”
AWARDS
Celebrating Co-operatives Fortnight in the birthplace of modern co-operation
Rochdale – the birthplace of modern
co-operation – has been celebrating the
start of Co-operatives Fortnight (17 June to
1 July 2017).
On Saturday 17 June, the Rochdale
Pioneers Museum and Manchester
Metropolitan School of Art hosted the
‘Festival of Rochdale Voices’, to mark both
Co-operatives Fortnight and the Great
Get Together (a national day to focus on
communities and cohesion in memory of
Jo Cox MP).
“We wanted to find out what people
think of the Rochdale area, and why they
feel the way they do about the places
they live in light of the Rowntree Report
about life in urban areas in 2017,” said
Liz McIvor, manager of the Co-operative
Heritage Trust.
“At the same time, the Co-operative
Heritage Trust began sessions related to
our upcoming exhibition and community
outreach programme ‘Tea and Biscuits’ by
asking visitors questions about how they
12 | JULY 2017

FINANCE
How to find investors for
your co-op: Accentuate
the positive
A new report offers some valuable
insights for co-operatives on the hunt for
investors, which reveals that more than
half the eligible population are interested
in ‘positive investment’.
The study, from positive investment
service Ethex, looks at attitudes towards
forms of investment which bring social as
well as financial returns, allowing money
to ‘do good’.
It says there is “unmet demand” for
such investment opportunities, which
co-ops can take advantage of. The report,
Understanding the Positive Investor, splits
this demand into five categories:
• The Well-informed (9.4 million) A
relatively large group that are interested,
engaged and see themselves as financially
savvy. Confident in their financial
capabilities, they believe in doing good
through positive investment, and are
aware of associated investment risk.
• The Progressives (5.4 million)
The highest proportion of those ‘very
interested’ in positive investment and
in exploring new ways in which to have
a positive impact on society. They tend low levels of wealth. They have a low level
to have
Understanding
very strong opinions about their of financial confidence feel they know
motivations the benefits of positive little about positive investing, which tends
investment
to prevent them from becoming engaged.
They show strong interest in current
the positive
• The Receptive (1.6 million) Only 4% of and savings accounts, not investment
the UK population and are the wealthiest products.
of the five groups in terms of median total
wealth.
investor
They are financially confident and
are willing spend time learning about
positive investments – but they need
convincing of the financial benefits.
A research study revealing
• The Sceptics the level of (18 interest million) in positive The largest
group making investment up almost in the United half the Kingdom eligible
population. Despite being the second
most wealthy group, they have a very low
level of interest in positive investment.
• The Unsure (3.6 million) While highly
motivated to give back to society, and
show the same level of interest in positive
investments as the Receptive, they have
The research shows that the majority
(19.5 million or 51%) of people are either
already saving and investing positively or
are interested in doing so.
To tap into this, Ethex recommends
better education on social and financial
benefits of positive investment; widening
the net to attract less wealthy investors;
paying more attention to younger
investors; and focusing on local, social
and simple projects.
u Ethex’s Understanding the Positive
Investor report can be downloaded at
s.coop/positiveinvestor.
drink their tea, and what tea means to
them. We are interested in how the history
of a culturally important product like
tea, sold by the Co-operative Wholesale
Society is explored, and how it can
provide a link between people of different
backgrounds, ages and experience.”
The festival was supported by Hovis,
who provided free loaves to give
away during the event (especially for
visitors observing Ramadan), and
included family friendly activities such
as face painting, poetry and singing, clog
dancing, crafts and free refreshments at
the museum site, St Mary’s in the Baum
church and on Toad Lane.
Rochdale town – which is run by a
co-operative council, also marked the
start of Co-operatives Fortnight with a
flag raising ceremony at Rochdale Town
Hall on the Esplanade. Tony Lloyd MP
(Labour), councillor Ian Duckworth
(mayor of Rochdale), Richard Farnell
(leader of the council) and other officers
of Rochdale Borough Council, members
of co-operatives and society boards were
all present at the ceremony. The flag will
fly for the duration of the fortnight, and
the council has committed to highlight
co-operative campaigns in the region.
“During Co-operative Fortnight this
year all on eyes will once again be on the
birthplace of what has become a global
phenomenon,” said Councillor Farnell.
“We must continue to celebrate and
value our unique heritage and I am very
proud of our links to the movement.
This celebration fortnight shows the
co-operative spirit is alive and well in
Rochdale and across the world.”
JULY 2017 | 13

OBITUARY
Robin Murray (1940-2017)
Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK, celebrates the life of a visionary
co-operator, radical economist and Fairtrade pioneer
Co-operation has always drawn visionary
thinkers and Robin Murray, who passed
away recently, was one.
An associate of Co-operatives UK from
2010, alongside a host of distinguished
affiliations, such as the London School
of Economics (LSE) and the Young
Foundation, he was educated at Balliol
College, Oxford, and at the LSE.
He then joined the London Business
School, where he lectured in economics,
moving to the Institute of Development
Studies, at the University of Sussex, where
he was a Fellow for 20 years.
In the 1980s, he was appointed by Ken
Livingstone, leader of the Greater London
Council, as his director of industry,
helping to promote a new industrial
strategy which at a time of rapid economic
change, with a hollowing out of industry
in the capital, had extraordinary success.
Robin worked with a team of talented
colleagues, including Michael Ward,
who went on to found the Centre for
Local Economics Strategies, and Hilary
Wainwright, later founder of Red Pepper.
In 1985, he helped to found Twin and
Twin Trading – fair trade pioneers with
a focus on the practical development of
co-ops in supply chains overseas. Twin’s
sister was Traidcraft, founded out of the
Christian churches, whereas Twin’s roots
were in the trade union and co-op sectors.
In the 1990s, he served as director
of development in the government of
Ontario, returning with a passion for
green enterprise. He also co-wrote the first
pamphlet for the think-tank Demos on
reforming taxation, which made him front
page news for a short while. That wasn’t
what he craved.
Robin was someone who enjoyed
collaboration, with a breadth of interests
and a passion for learning. As Stephen
Yeo, author, academic and chair of the
Co-operative Heritage Trust, says, Robin’s
own achievements were “always drowned
by his enthusiasms for what his friends
and comrades had done”.
In 2011, true to that, he delivered on a
commission that I had approached him
to lead, which was to look at the future
of the co-operative sector. The report Cooperation
in the Age of Google was hugely
influential here in the UK and overseas.
He made it clear that the sector had
lost some of the cutting edge that it
had arguably held before, identifying
the extent to which co-operative
methodologies had been adapted for use
outside of the formal co-operative sector.
His recommendations embraced
ambition – a passionate supporter
of the case for co-operative education,
he argued for the establishment of a
co-operative university as well as an
Innovation Programme, which started
work at Co-operatives UK the following
year, with the first Co-operative
Innovation Prize, run in partnership with
the Department for Business and with
Robin on the judging panel.
At Co-operative Congress in 2011,
Robin presented his findings and stayed
talking with co-operative development
practitioners in the bar with characteristic
charm and politeness until 3am in the
morning.
He also served on the Wales Commission
on Co-operatives and Mutuals. As good
as that report was, the flow of creative
and substantive emails from Robin as
a commissioner encouraging a look at
wider options, such as a co-operative
investment bank for Wales modelled on
Caja Laboral in Spain, pointed to what
could have been.
When the idea of ‘social innovation’
started to gain recognition, Robin travelled
widely to spread the word. He emailed me
after visiting Crumlin Gaol in Belfast. He
was there to talk about social innovation
in the context of peace and reconciliation.
Later he was shown round the gaol – “so
shocking” he reported “that I find it hard
to write about”.
But write about it he did: “I was with
one of the people who had been interned
there in the 70s and who had (bravely, I
thought) decided to return. Talk about
co-operation! The extraordinary and
terrible world of the prisoners. The
prisoner’s dilemma which is all about
individualism is in some ways the opposite
of what seems to characterise life there.
“The ex-prisoner was the one who
has been the driver of the Irish language
movement in the Falls Road, which now
has 41 schools that teach Irish across the
communities. One of his favourite words is
meitheal, that is pronounced mehal, which
he translated as ‘together’, or what one
does when there is a break in the weather
and adjoining farms work together to save
the hay. But we might translate as mutual
or co-operative.”
In recent years, as an associate of
Co-operatives UK, Robin was active in
working with Pat Conaty and Laurie
Gregory, among others, on the challenges
of social care and the kind of innovations
that could develop a person-centred
approach. He was drawing in part on his
time at the Design Council, in part on his
acute sense of how to make mutuality
work in business terms, for commercial
advantage. He was an active supporter of
his local co-operatives, in Hackney, where
he lived, and Cumbria, where he rested.
John Restakis this week called Robin
“a beacon of hope, insight, and optimism
for so many of us.” Hilary Wainwright
said that “Robin exuded vigour and
hope. And he infected those around
him with his mood”. Michel Bauwens,
of the P2P Foundation, has written that
“my conversations with him had been
electrifying, and we stayed in touch,
meeting a few times in between. He was
an amazing man and his life story left me
speechless. He was a true hero!”
The LSE economist Carlota Perez is
collecting Robin’s writings with the
intention to publish them as an online
collection.
My last time with Robin was spent by
his bed, talking about values and how
co-ops work well when their values inspire
them to be courageous, to do new things.
To the end, he was hopeful and I sign off
this tribute with his own words of hope:
“The informal information economy is
open and global. It is driven by interest
14 | JULY 2017

and enthusiasm rather than money. The
bulk of its traffic is free.
“It is taking time to digest the
implications of these changes, and for
those involved to work out what rules are
necessary to govern behaviour. Some have
seen it as a new form of the commons, and
looked at codes of behaviour that have
been developed by those using common
land or fishing grounds. But this informal
economy is more than sharing a common
resource, for with the web the resource
is unlimited. It is a site for relationships,
and where joint projects are involved,
it requires the kind of qualities found
in those pioneer communities where
everyone worked together to raise the roof
of a home.
“It is growing with the speed and
diversity of a tropical forest. It is informal
and astonishingly inventive. It shares
many of the same values and practices
of formal co-operatives, and opens up
numerous possibilities for a meshing
between them. William Morris’s News
from Nowhere depicted a world based on
mutualism that for more than a century
was seen as utopian. But in the last
decade it has emerged as a reality not on
the banks of the Thames but in the world
of the web.”
p Robin Murray was a leading light in the growth of social innovation (Photo: Bethany Murray)
UNIONS
Co-op union Naco votes to consider transfer to Usdaw as membership falls
Co-operative trade union Naco is in
discussions to transfer engagements to the
management arm of retail union Usdaw.
Naco, which celebrates its 100th
anniversary this year, mostly represents
managers at consumer co-operatives,
but a period of uncertainty has seen a
membership decline over several years,
bringing with it significant concerns.
Its annual meeting in June passed
motion to allow talks to begin was passed
by all present (with one abstention).
Discussions will commence with Sata
(Supervisory, Administrative and
Technical Association), the management
section within the Union of Shop,
Distributive & Allied Workers (Usdaw).
Naco was established as the National
Association of Co-operative Officials
in 1917. As a professional management
association, it assists members,
representing as a union on an individual
basis, providing advice and support, and
negotiating through collective bargaining.
“While this is a very sad day for the
union, it is a necessary step forward to
look at a potential transfer into Sata,
as the alternative could have seen the
complete collapse of Naco due to the falls
in membership we’ve witnessed,” said
Bob Lister, interim general secretary. “The
union is exceptionally mindful that all
members are fully considered in the talks
that will start shortly.”
Naco represents managers at the Co-op
Group, Central England, Channel Islands,
Chelmsford Star, East of England, Heart
of England, Lincolnshire, Midcounties,
Scotmid and Southern.
But the union is mindful of how the
move could affect member organisations
outside retail – such as Co-operatives UK,
Co-operative Party and the Phone Co-op.
This is one of the areas to “be discussed in
some detail,” said Mr Lister.
JULY2017 | 15

GLOBAL UPDATES
INDIA
Celebrating 50
years of the fertiliser
co-op that fed a nation
and became a giant
A co-op formed to improve fertiliser
supply to farmers in India to help them
feed the country has been celebrating
a 50-year journey into the ranks of the
world’s leading co-ops.
The Indian Farmers Fertiliser
Cooperative (IFFCO) is the biggest
co-op in the world by turnover on GDP per
capita, with 6,000 employees and 36,000
member co-ops, and is the country’s
biggest maker and distributor of fertiliser,
reaching nearly 40 million farmers.
Its has been placed sixth in the Business
Standard 1000 list of Indian companies,
and 37th in Fortune India’s 500 largest
companies.
To mark its half-century, managing
director Dr U S Awasthi and his team are
travelling the country, meeting farmers
at 125 locations to tell them about
government initiatives ranging from soil
testing projects to digital transactions.
It’s a lap of honour for the co-op, which
was founded on 31 August 1967 to produce
and distribute the fertiliser the country
urgently needed to lift grain production.
IFFCO has been sustained by the co-op
ethos since its inception, when the young
1960s generation in India responded to
the ideals of self-help, accountability,
democracy, equality, equity and
solidarity. This remains strong, with the
business working to develop women’s
co-ops and improve sustainability.
A spokesperson said: “IFFCO runs on
the co-operative principles at very local
level but operates globally. The board of
directors have the pulse of the member
co-operatives which helps them take
decisions for the growth and benefit of
farmers and co-operatives.”
Elections are held at every level, with
1,000 delegates sent to the AGM; and all
IFFCO operations are transparent, and
available to view online.
Dr Awasthi, a chemical engineer of five
decades’ experience, said: “There is a
deep resonance between IFFCO’s growth
and our society’s development;
our trajectories run in parallel.
Working together is our path into
the future – for the nation and for
IFFCO.”
IFFCO’s story began with
two plants at Kalol and Kandia
as it worked to build its capacity
to produce ammonia, urea
and NPK fertilisers. Sites were
constructed and expanded
across the country until, after
the millennium, it became an
autonomous co-operative with
partnerships in India and abroad.
It now has a multinational
presence and has moved into
sectors like general insurance,
agro-chemicals, rural telephony,
farm forestry, international
trading, seeds and rural retail.
But, its spokesperson insists, “the
trust, faith and love of farmers is also its
success”. And the co-op ethos that chimed
so well with the young India of 1967 has
led IFFCO into a drive to “empower”
rural India – via disaster relief, free
health and eye checks, assistance for
rural hospitals, afforestation and rural
development. Livelihood and natural
resource management projects are being
carried out in thousands of villages, and
a Cooperative Rural Development Trust
has been set up to offer skills in crop
and animal husbandry, horticulture,
mechanisation and beekeeping.
Forestry projects include the planting
more than 1.5 million neem trees in a year.
Uses of neem oil range from medicine to
the production of polymers.
Members are being taught about mobile
banking and how to digitally manage
their finances in a low-cash economy and
access online services, such as pensions.
p IFFCO workers celebrate the half century
p Top: Fertilising the crops with IFFCO. Above: Dr
Awasthi meets farmers on the anniversary tour
IFFCO has organised 130 cashless
education programmes, which have seen
around 40,000 accounts opened.
The IFFCO Foundation carried
out studies on agriculture and rural
development to influence government
policy, and the co-op has established
professors’ chairs in agricultural and
co-operative institutions to foster research
and co-op education.
It is also carrying out environmental
projects, with a Save The Soil campaign,
energy-efficient production plants, and
water conservation measures. IFFCO’s
platform for sustainable agriculture
operates in 11 languages, and aims to cover
all the country’s languages; it already has
more than 11 million users.
IFFCO says this is part of an ethos that
has seen it “reach almost every village of
the country and gain the faith, love and
trust of millions of Indian farmers”.
16 | JULY 2017

GREECE
Young co-op brings an innovative spirit to agriculture
A co-op set up in 2013 by a group of
young Greek farmers is going from
strength to strength, expanding from
its initial membership of 23 to 75.
Thesgi, which farms 30,000 acres
in Thessaly, sells spinach, broccoli,
lettuce and cauliflower to wholesalers
and retailers, at home and in Ukraine
and Romania. Member Afroditi
Bontzorlou says the co-op is “young in
spirit”, with a different attitude from
older co-ops which were seen as too
traditional.
“These growers made it clear that
they wanted to establish a co-operative
that was different from traditional coops,”
he added. “They would work as a coop,
but they would also implement new
ideas on how to work with the market.
To that end, Thesgi has a logistics
department dedicated to transport
management and communications,
and a general financial department that
manages all banking and payments.
There is also a centralised organisation
to help with challenges such as trade with
the Ukraine – which, because it is outside
p Thesgi is focusing on vegetable produce
the EU, is more complex than the exports
to Romania.
There are different challenges at home,
where health-conscious Greek shoppers
are happy to pay extra for food quality,
despite the struggling economy.
“That is why we are working according
to a Western marketing model, with a
larger emphasis on quality,” said Mr
Bontzorlou. “We’re not the cheapest
in the market, but we aim to provide
premium quality through certifications
like globalGAP.”
It also produces cereals and cotton,
but the co-op is focusing on vegetables
to move away from monoculture, and
because it is a growing market with
greater yields, and requiring less water.
“We mainly operate with contract
farmers,” said Bontzorlou. “At the
beginning of the year, we sign contracts
that determine the volumes and prices.
In this way, all our members know in
advance how much acreage is needed
and what prices are obtained.”
But Mr Bontzorlou wants to see the
co-op, and the wider industry, improve.
“The vegetable sector is one of the
most important pillars of the Greek
economy,” he said. “We need to invest
in infrastructure, precision farming
technologies and improving our methods.
“We need an overarching organisation
that takes care of management and
marketing.
“This needs to be addressed in the near
future, as we do have everything it takes
to produce great quality. The weather is
greatly in our favour. But good growing
conditions aren’t enough.”
CANADA
New business role for ICA president Monique Leroux
The president of the International
Co-operative Alliance, Monique Leroux,
is joining Canadian asset management
firm Fiera Capital as vice chair and
strategic adviser.
The new role also makes Ms Leroux a
member of the firm’s strategic development
committee.
“It is big news for Fiera Capital, our
employees, our shareholders and our
numerous clients and partners,” said
Jean-Guy Desjardins, chair of the board of
directors and president and chief executive
officer of Fiera Capital.
“Monique Leroux is a renowned and
respected person in this country’s financial
sector. She embodies thoroughness and
excellence, in addition to having forged
an exceptional reputation everywhere she
has worked.
“Her career path has made her an
admired person in finance, be it at the head
of important Canadian organisations, on
boards of directors or within international
groupings. Fiera Capital is stronger today
with the arrival of Ms Leroux, as her
contribution will give a new push to the
second phase of our strategic plan which
will lead us to 2020.”
Ms Leroux is also president of the board
of directors of Investment Quebec and chair
of the Economic and Innovation Council of
the government of Quebec.
She sits on the boards of Bell (BCE),
Couche-Tard (ATD), Michelin (ML-France)
and S&P Global. Fiera Capital had
more than CAD$116bn in assets under
management as in December 2016.
Ms Leroux said: “Fiera Capital is a
Canadian flagship firm that shines thanks
to the professionals that work with integrity
and share a common mission: ensuring
the full satisfaction of the clients and
reaching results.
p Monique Leroux
“I am happy to be able to support Jean-
Guy Desjardins and his global management
team by assisting a solid and ambitious
organisation with development objectives
in North America and abroad. It is a
stimulating challenge that awaits me and I
take it on with enthusiasm.”
JULY 2017 | 17

EUROPEAN UNION
Co-ops included in new development strategy
EU member states have signed a joint
strategy for the future of European
development which includes several
mentions of the co-operative movement.
The new European Consensus on
Development, which sets out an agenda
to eradicate poverty and promote
sustainable development, applies to all
EU institutions and member states.
It was signed during
the annual two-day
European Development
Days by European
Parliament president,
Antonio Tajani,
Malta’s prime minister
Joseph Muscat on
behalf of the council
and member states,
European Commission
president Jean-Claude
Juncker and the high
representative/vice president Federica
Mogherini. In its three mentions of co-ops,
the document highlights their role as key
actors in international development and
the implementation of the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs).
Cooperatives Europe, the regional office
of the International Co-operative Alliance,
welcomed the new consensus.
“Cooperatives Europe is very proud
of such remarkable recognition for
co-operatives,” the organisation said in a
statement on its website.
“This paper will serve as a reference
for external policies and development
co-operation during the next decade, and
will provide the baseline for any future
implementations.”
p EU leaders sign the new European Consensus on Development (Photo: European Commission)
USA
Funding boost for US international co-op
development but projects are cut at home
US Congress has passed an omnibus
appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2017
that adds US $1m to the international
Cooperative Development Program (CDP),
bringing the total to $12m.
The CDP supports partnerships between
US co-ops and co-op development
initiatives in the developing world. The
programme, which started in the early
1960s, has created thousands of jobs,
leveraged hundreds of millions of private
funding and helped hundreds of millions
of co-op and credit union members.
Paul Hazen, OCDC executive director,
said current projects include food
security, savings and loans, democratic
organisations, health, telecommunications
and electrification.
OCDC says its mission is to promote
effective, sustainable international cooperative
development, and it global
leaders in the field working in Africa, Latin
America and Asia.
With projects in over 70 countries, OCDC
members implement the largest portfolio of
co-operative development programmes in
the world.
But there is less positive news on the
domestic front, with several co-ops among
578 signatories of a letter to Congress
opposing the Trump administration’s
proposed cuts to rural development.
Accusing the government of a “wholesale
retreat” from rural problems, the letter says
the plans would “substantially diminish
resources dedicated to improving rural
communities and the lives of rural people”.
The cuts will close more than two
dozen housing and rural development
programmes, and more than £3bn in
financing will be lost, says the letter.
Co-op and mutual organisations signing
the letter include national apex body
NCBA CLUSA, CDS Consulting Co-op, the
Cooperative Development Institute, and a
number of state development centres and
energy providers.
In FY 2016 alone USDA made available
over $29bn in loans, guarantees, grants,
and related assistance to over 157,000
p Mixed fortunes for co-ops at Congress
individuals, businesses, non-profit
corporations, co-ops, and governments.
The 578 signatories want these
programmes to continue, with spending at
least matching 2017 levels.
More than 46 million people live in
rural areas of the US and the letter warns
these regions face stark problems, such as
inadequate drinking water, slow recovery
from the 2008 crash, community bank
closures and collapsing agricultural prices.
Other signatories include the National
Rural Housing Coalition, National Farmers
Union and National Development Council,
along with Native American organisations,
universities, development institutes,
church groups and housing organisations.
18 | JULY 2017

AUSTRIA
World’s credit
unions gather in Vienna
for global conference
More than 1,800 of the world’s credit
union representatives are expected in
Vienna this month for the annual World
Credit Union conference.
The event will focus on three key topics:
millennials, cyber security and digital
trends, with keynote speakers and more
than 30 educational sessions on the latest
trends and best practices.
Women credit union leaders can take
part in the Global Women’s Leadership
Forum run by the World Council’s Global
Women’s Leadership Network, and for
those under 35, there is a dedicated
World Council Young Credit Union People
(WYCUP) programme.
The conference starts on Sunday, 23
July with an opening ceremony, the Global
Women’s Leadership Network Forum and
the World Young Credit Union People
Program Forum.
Monday sees a keynote speech by
Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with
Altimeter, which focuses on helping
businesses thrive by using disruptive
technologies. A TED speaker, she is on the
board of the Big Boulder Initiative, which
promotes the ethical use of data. The
speech will be followed by a networking
break, breakout sessions, and the World
Council Annual General Meeting. In the
evening delegates have the option to
reserve tickets for a performance by the
Vienna Boys’ Choir.
On Tuesday there is a presentation by
Robert Herjavec, best known for his role
in ABC’s reality show, Shark Tank. He will
explore evolving technology trends and
cyber security threats. Throughout the day
delegates will have the chance to attend
multiple breakout sessions as well as the
Small Credit Union Forum.
The final day begins with breakout
sessions followed by a keynote speech
by Simon Mainwaring, founder and chief
executive of consultancy We First. He will
look at the mindset of millennials and
look at how credit unions must tell their
brand stories to inspire them.
u
wcucvienna2017.org
Coop Switzerland launches vegetarian supermarket
Coop Switzerland has launched its first
store devoted solely to vegetarian and
vegan products. The Karma store, based
at Zug station near Zurich, offers fresh
produce, basic food items, vegan and
vegetarian cosmetics, freshly prepared
beverages, nuts, cereals, and a range of
convenience products.
Ease the way for new co-ops, Macron government urged
After French president Emmanuel
Macron’s La REM party won a majority
in parliament, the co-op movement
has a policy wishlist. Les Scop, which
represents worker and collective interest
co-ops, wants measures to make it easier
for employees to own a stake in their
companies, or convert firms into co-ops.
New US conference will assess the co-op impact
A conference is being launched in the USA
to bring together “a broad spectrum of
co-op sectors to build on and amplify the
economic impact co-ops have in the US and
internationally”. Impact 2017, organised
by the National Cooperative Business
Association CLUSA International, is held
on 4-6 October in Alexandria, Virginia.
Funding drive to encourage Zimbabwe co-op growth
The government of Zimbabwe has launched
a ZWD $90m (£190,833) programme to
boost SMEs and co-ops, as part of its drive
to stimulate growth. The funding will
be allocated through the Reserve Bank
of Zimbabwe and administered by the
ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises
and Cooperative Development.
t Capital city Harare (Photo: Martin Addison)
Vietnam government pledges co-op revolution
The Vietnamese government is committed
to a bringing in a co-operative revolution,
said prime minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.
The plan is to increase the number of
co-ops in Vietnam by 15,000 by 2020. Mr
Nguyen added that law on co-operatives
had been amended three times to kickstart
the co-op movement.
JULY 2017 | 19

p Auckland will need more than 400,000 homes by the middle of the century
NEW ZEALAND
Are co-ops the answer to the country’s growing housing crisis?
New Zealand is poorly served when it
comes to housing co-operatives – and that
needs to change as the shortage of homes
hits crisis levels, argues one sector leader.
Craig Presland, CEO of apex body
Cooperative Business NZ, warned that only
7,200 homes were built in Auckland, the
country’s largest city, last year – a figure
which needs to double in an area which
needs another 420,000 homes by 2045.
Writing on the Cooperatives Business
NZ website, he said the answer is co-op
housing. He points to successful examples
in other countries, sets out options for a
housing co-op model, and challenges
government to make it happen.
“We need a game changer,” he added.
“NZ is one of the most co-operative
economies of the world, with our co-ops,
mutuals and societies generating around
one-fifth of GDP.
“Unfortunately, we have virtually no coops
operating within the housing sector.
This is in stark contrast to elsewhere
in the world where housing co-ops are
experiencing significant growth.”
He highlighted Zurich in Switzerland,
which has seen nearly a quarter of all new
housing units built by co-ops since 2000
(see panel). For decades, two co-op housing
federations have maintained a loan
fund for construction, repairs and land
purchase, fuelling a co-op housing boom.
It even helped the country weather
the 2008 financial crisis. “As the private
mortgage market and real estate projects
worldwide ground to a halt, housing coops
built 1,000 units in Zurich,” says Mr
Presland. “The co-op business model is all
about sustainability and endures during
good times and bad.”
In Geneva, a non-profit housing
developer has recently raised US $3m
from co-op residents, which will fund
600 new affordable units in one of the
world’s most expensive cities. This, says
Mr Presland, proves that co-ops can deal
with a housing market that has seen
lenders, estate agents, builders and local
authorities inflate costs.
“A housing co-operative, based on
strong co-operative principles, would be
able to lower costs. Communities in need
would be able to pool resources – funds,
labour and available land to build new
homes on.”
Mr Presland sets out two options for a
New Zealand housing co-op sector, with
“democratically run organisations, not-forprofit,
formed to own and manage housing”.
Under the first, the co-op would own
the land: individuals can buy homes –
borrowing from the co-op on favourable
terms – but only lease the land.
This would keep houses affordable by
removing land from the equation and
preventing units being resold on the
open market, with properties held at an
affordable price under a resale formula in
the lease.
“Owners can still finance the purchase
with a mortgage, and improve the home
as they see fit,” adds Mr Presland. “They
could also sit on the board to help make
decisions about how the co-op is run.”
He says this model is common in the US,
where the largest example, the Champlain
Housing Trust in Vermont, is home to over
1,000 families and holds $300m in assets.
Under the second option, members
would not own their home – instead they
would have shares in the co-op, entitling
them to their unit for as long as they own
the shares.
“Typically, such co-ops own multifamily
buildings with individual flats and
shared common spaces. Co-op members
could sell their shares on the open market,
but acquiring a loan for a co-op share
could be more challenging than getting
a traditional mortgage which sometimes
depresses the cost of co-ops.”
Uruguay and Switzerland – where
co-ops in Zurich set their prices at an
average 70 to 80% of the market rate –
are world leaders with this model, whose
democratic governance structure fosters
collective decision-making.
Mr Presland challenged the country’s
authorities to make the co-op model work.
“To drive this initiative successfully will
require NZ government, local council and
local community support along with that
of co-operatives, mutuals and societies.
“In addition, we require a group of
individuals with the vision, courage and
capability to set up such co-operatives.
Cooperative Business NZ is here to help.”
p The award-winning Mehr als Wohnen development
20 | JULY 2017

SWITZERLAND
Co-ops unite to build a new model
for community housing
Co-operatives, community land trusts
and other housing models are coming
together to help communities design their
homes and neighbourhoods.
The new concept – social production
of habitat (SPH) – means locals are
involved in projects which meet their own
specifications rather than those set by the
private market.
Based in Switzerland, the project began
when a group of community-led housing
practitioners met to form a global network
to increase the visibility of the model and
support local efforts.
The partners are the Asian Coalition
for Housing Rights, Building and Social
Housing Foundation (BSHF), Grounded
Solutions Network (GSN), Habitat
International Coalition, Co-operative
Housing International (CHI), Slum
Dwellers International, and UrbaMonde.
UrbaMonde co-ordinates activities,
bringing together the six housing groups
to share practices and experiences.
Project manager Léa Oswald said:
“Participants expressed their will to join
forces to create a broader network to make
innovative and successful projects visible,
in order to foster a wider implementation.”
As well as bringing together communityled
housing projects, the platform also
wants to create links with public and
Zurich, a world capital of housing co-ops
Zurich’s housing co-op movement dates
back as far as 1919 when the Swiss
Co-operative Association started work on
the Freidorf Housing Estate, Basel.
City administrators at the start of
the century secured land and offered
subsidies to meet a housing shortage
– and today, the city offers interest-free
loans to housing co-ops to assist with
the purchase of land, and long-term
renewable leases and development
rights on land the city owns.
Co-ops must meet certain obligations
to get help from the city, including
provision of low-cost housing and
running an architecture competition to
encourage innovation and young talent.
p UrbaMonde Social Production of Habitat partners
private actors, she added. To this end,
UrbaMonde runs a digital social platform,
psh.urbamonde.org, and annual meetings
which bring together community-led
housing actors of a specific region to
exchange experiences.
Organisations can also be rewarded
for projects through the SPH Award. Last
year’s European SPH Award and World
Habitat Award winner was Swiss housing
co-op Mehr als Wohnen (Zurich).
The next Latin American meeting is
held in Mexico on 19 June, and the projects
which will receive awards have just been
announced. These include two co-ops –
A co-operative can qualify for help with
as few as seven people.
Experts say the policy saves the city
social costs because affordable rents
keep assistance payments down.
A quarter of the city’s entire housing
stock is now not-for-profit – and four
fifths of this number is co-operative.
Larger co-ops include BGZ, with over
2,000 residential units in the city; and
ABZ, which has around 4700 dwellings
in the Zurich area.
A co-operative revival followed a
housing crash in the 1990s, sparking
a new wave of radical, innovative
developments such as Kalkbreite,
Kraftwerk and Mehr als Wohnen.
Cooperativa Habitacional Esperança of
Brazil and Cobañados of Paraguay.
“Community-led housing models
are spreading around the world, which
demonstrates that, through collective
action, a large variety of effective solutions
can be found to the lack of access to
housing,” said Ms Oswald.
“The housing co-op model is one of
the most implemented. It focuses on
a sustainable, healthy, accessible and
secure urban environment, where people
live together – where people design, build
and share their common space in new
innovative ways and, through that, create
a strong social cohesion.”
Over 100 projects feature on
UrbaMonde’s digital platform, many of
them co-ops or community land trusts.
CHI and GSN are also involved in
regional hubs and want to raise US
$54,000 to coordinate workshops and
administer the award in North America.
The next hub is held on 9-12 October in
Oakland, California.
“Plans are to develop and strengthen
the international network of social
production of habitat, starting with
the implementation of the platform in
different regions worldwide (Africa and
Asia in 2018),” said Ms Oswald.
The platform’s peer-to-peer financing
is a way for housing co-ops to get a better
return on investment and provide access
to finance to groups in regions where
financing is hard to come by, she added.
JULY 2017 | 21

YOUR VIEWS
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRAINING FOR ALL
I heard from a member of its National
Members’ Council that one of the nonexecutive
directors of the Co-operative
Group had said recently, when asked
about director training, that he didn’t need
any training.
This sort of arrogance and contempt is
surely illustrative of the attitudes in this
former co-operative whereby City-type
clones are put on the board because they
are deemed to be superior to ordinary
mortals such as active co-operators, none
of whom has managed to get onto the
board in the last few years.
Geraint Day
Swindon
TWITTER AS A CO-OP?
Responding to: Twitter shareholders reject
calls to investigate co-operative ownership
The actual vote in favour reported on
SEC form 8-K was 4.934%. In the coming
months we will solicit helpful research and
will discuss possibilities with Twitter users,
employees, management and, hopefully,
the board.
We’re just getting started. The cost of a
study is next to nothing for a company like
Twitter. The potential benefits are huge.
Twitter needs to differentiate itself from
the democratic-free zones of Alphabet,
Facebook and Snap.
We’re pushing free speech and
empowerment around the world. Why
not build that democratic spirit into the
governance of Twitter as a company?
James McRitchie
Via website
concern about losing their unique store
in Churchstoke. Midcounties chief
executive Ben Reid had said: “We will,
over time, take the opportunity to update
the shopping experience but customers
and our new colleagues can rest assured
we fully appreciate how much this unique
group of stores are cherished by their local
communities.”
On bank holiday Saturday the ribbon
was finally cut, giving a chance to see
if the new store retained some of the
Tuffins specialities – bulk bags of ground
almonds, cherries and mixed peel for
instance?
There was no sign of them – had
Churchstoke become an identikit co-op?
But wait – help was at hand. “Did we
get what we wanted...No?... Hang on, we’ll
see if we can get it listed again”. Store
manager Vince Sage goes off to check if
there’s any left in the warehouse. Time
passes – “So sorry for the wait – please
accept this bottle with our compliments...”
Back comes Mr Sage with three out of
the four things on the list – “please have
these with our compliments”. Generous,
and perhaps more amazingly, even
though they are not on the Federal Trading
Services or local range, they can be relisted.
Midcounties also have a policy of
getting what customers want, subject to a
minimum turnover.
Clearly, everyone wants customers to be
happy on an opening day, but it’s hard to
see this scene being played out in Group
stores where, if it’s not on the planogram,
you can’t have it – period.
The Co-op can’t go back to the old
days when managers ordered things
individually – some were efficient, some
were hopeless, too much hit and miss –
Have your say
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but the independents do seem to have an
advantage in being able to add a touch of
flexibility to the core range.
It’s a little bit sad not to be able to get
lost in the caverns of old Tuffins any more,
rain echoing off the roof and a new wonder
round every corner, but thanks today for
great customer service – CSA on the till,
store manager and regional managers all
pulling the stops out to keep a couple of
customers happy.
Best of luck to Midcounties in bringing
the co-op back to Mid Wales and in
finessing the range with the butcher,
the clothier, the plant shop, the cafe,
the pound shop, the resident parrot and
polar bear – all of which help to make
Churchstoke a unique store – Long Live
Harry Tuffins – and Midcounties!
Callum Johnston
Via email
HARRY TUFFINS IS DEAD: LONG LIVE
HARRY TUFFINS!
(Not your average retail Coop...)
That quirkiest of supermarkets in Mid
Wales, purveyor of ferret food, jumbo
bags of raisins and almonds, fireplace
accessories and the best pound shop in
Wales, has taken up the co-op mantle.
When Midcounties bought Tuffins
in 2012, several customers expressed
22 | JULY 2017

Greenbelt, a festival with the co-op vibe
Greenbelt is a festival whose mission is to
create spaces where art, faith and justice
collide; where artistry and activism,
spirituality and politics, faith and justice
come together, with music, visual and
performing arts, comedy, talks and
discussion ... but what’s that got to do
with co-operatives?
As a visitor to Greenbelt over recent
years, I have frequently been struck by
the opportunity for co-operatives. It is
expecting 10,000 visitors of all ages this
year, with participation from community
activists, public sector workers, faithbased
organisations, and charities.
A further 10,000 people are linked to
Greenbelt via email and social media.
This is an audience the co-op
movement should be engaging with. In
previous years, I have attended talks
on ethical consumerism, challenging
investor-ownership, trade justice and
other areas where the co-op movement
has been a leading light – but co-ops
have not been present.
There is a particular reason why it is
appropriate for this to change in 2017:
the theme for this year’s festival is the
Common Good.
For the last couple of years, my colleague
David Alcock at Anthony Collins Solicitors
and I have been working with leading
retail societies to attempt to articulate a
core purpose for co-operation: what is it
trying to achieve?
Our broad answer is a fairer and more
just way of trading, which seeks the
common good. This made us realise that
co-operatives should be at Greenbelt this
year, engaging with a dynamic festival
audience which is hungry for change.
That is why Co-op Energy, the Phone
Co-op and Anthony Collins Solicitors have
come together to facilitate the Exchange, a
venue at the festival to explore enterprise
for the common good. Each of our
organisations champions this value. Coop
Energy supplies electricity and gas to
over 400,000 domestic customers across
England, Scotland and Wales. Established
in 2010 by the Midcounties Co-operative,
it puts co-operative values at the heart of
the business to offer a fair and transparent
service. With its goal to obtain 75% of
This year’s Greenbelt Festival, held at Broughton House, Northants,
from 25-28 August, includes a new venue, The Exchange, which
focuses on Enterprise for the Common Good. The Exchange is
hosted by the Phone Co-op, Co-operative Energy and Anthony
Collins Solicitors, whose consultant Cliff Mills writes here about
why the festival is such a good match for the co-op movement ...
energy from renewables within two years,
it has already stopped supplying energy
from coal.
The Phone Co-op is a consumer coop
telecommunications provider, which
does business to make a difference
and contribute to a better world. Social
responsibility affects everything it does,
including how it invest its profits – over
£500,000 in the last year in a range of
co-ops, community benefit societies and
socially responsible projects.
Anthony Collins Solicitors is a valuesdriven
law firm whose explicit purpose is
to improve lives, communities and society.
Its “Social Business” team creates,
supports and grows enterprises such as
community organisations, co-ops, social
enterprises and values-driven businesses.
Each of these organisations seeks
to distinguish itself from competitors
through its commitment to trading for
the common good, rather than for private
benefit. They all passionately believe that
this factor makes them better businesses,
better employers, and better citizens.
And this is what they want to share
at Greenbelt. They want to be advocates
for a fairer and more just way of doing
business; to explain what they are and
why they operate as they do, and to justify
the argument that business does not have
to be fuelled by private gain.
The Exchange will host talks,
interviews, stories, drop-ins, surgeries,
and networking opportunities. We have
invited a number of other organisations to
share our space, including Co-operatives
UK and a range of grass-roots and
community-based organisations. We look
forward to seeing you there.
u Tickets for the festival are available at
www.greenbelt.org.uk and cost between
£21-£59 for day tickets and £50-£185 for
weekend tickets.
JULY 2017 | 23

MEET...
... Deb Oxley, campaigner
for employee ownership
Deb Oxley is chief executive of the Employee Ownership Association, which
offers guidance and support to businesses wishing to be part of a growing
sector which currently employs over 200,000 people in the UK with an annual
turnover of £40bn. She joined the Hull-based EOA in 2012 after running her
own marketing and business consultancy.
WHY DID YOU TAKE ON THE ROLE?
q Deb Oxley speaks
at the Co-op Party’s
conference on the
co-operative economy
in January
I didn’t know anything about the EOA when I first
came across it. I saw there was an opportunity
to make a big impact. Back in 2012 we needed to
sustain membership and raise awareness. A lot
of it was about marketing which was where I had
started my career. I had the opportunity to go to
an EOA conference and was blown away by their
enthusiasm. Before that I ran my own small business
consultancy for six years dealing with place and
destination marketing working with public/private
partnership regeneration in Hull. I had not worked
out exactly what I wanted to do and was interested
in the challenge.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE A TYPICAL DAY?
There isn’t one but when I think about where do I
spend time it’s helping our members – connecting
them up with others and helping them to understand
employee ownership better. That can be over the
telephone or face to face when I have the opportunity.
I spend a lot of time influencing stakeholders,
dealing with media, government and professional
organisations. I attend events throughout the year
and then there is day-to-day stuff like governance
and finances and board meetings. We have also
just launched a membership council which is really
exciting, I spend a lot of time at regional gatherings
we have a national conference in Birmingham and
an annual summer dinner which this year was at the
House of Commons on election day.
WHAT’S YOUR DIFFERENCE?
The biggest difference is giving a voice to the sector,
which is important for the economy. We use our
voice in campaigning and provide a platform for
employee-owned businesses in England.
We are also providing the first port of call for any
owner interested in employee ownership because
there is no government-provided service – in
Scotland and Wales they are government-funded.
We provide support to those that want to find out
more and an important network for employers to
learn from each other. It’s good to be part of that
community.
WHAT IS THE BEST THING ABOUT THE JOB?
It’s about making a difference. Every day we are
either helping an owner move their business to
the next stage, changing someone’s opinion of
what employee ownership is, or helping existing
businesses to do better. I love working with the team
I have. They are really dedicated and we have been
really lucky to recruit such fantastic people. There
are seven of us and I am the longest-serving member.
In the four and a half years I have been here we have
made great progress as an organisation.
AND THE HARDEST?
There are always more opportunities than resources
and that is frustrating. It means we have to be clever
in the way we use our resources. I would love to
spend more time meeting members but we have to
be very targeted and focused in our activity. On one
level it makes you more productive but the downside
is not always having the ability to take opportunities
when they crop up.
24 | JULY 2017

HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE
CO-OP MOVEMENT?
Co-ops, social enterprises and employee-owned
businesses operate in a similar space. We are all
promoting more progressive forms of capitalism.
The employee-owned model does what it says on
the tin. They are not all necessarily co-ops or social
enterprises – some of them are distant cousins
but part of the same family. However, we all share
the basic DNA when it comes to doing business.
We believe in a fairer type of capitalism and focus
on people as a strength of our organisations. We
believe in organisations that recognise their wider
societal impact whether through being missionled
or having a positive impact. The fact they have
done what they have done embeds them in the same
supply chain.
join our journey
be a member
WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THE EOA IN THE
NEXT FIVE YEARS?
It’s more a case of, where would I like to see the sector?
Whatever we become is in line with that. We have
a big bold statement to make. At the moment, not
every professional adviser has heard of employeeowned
business, so we need to change that. By
2020 I would like to see every accountancy practice
with at least one person who knows what they are.
I would like to see more high street banks lending
to employee-owned businesses. There are pockets
of understanding but it would be good if higher and
further education covered employee ownership as
part of the syllabus for graduates coming out with
business degrees. We act as a sectoral voice and
where we do not have to raise awareness we will
be driving for more influence on a range of topics
– delivering a very buoyant successful organisation
which is part of the mainstream.
WHAT ACHIEVEMENT ARE YOU PROUDEST OF?
Setting up my own business in 2006. I did not think I
had the confidence to do that. I have also welcomed
the experience to grow an organisation.
The single bit of advice I have is to trust your
instincts because what you learn as you get to a
certain age is that your gut instincts are right. I
have done things in this role I have never done
before. I have been to Number 10, been on BBC-held
discussions with senior leaders of business and
spoken at a conference before 700 people.
There is nothing to be scared of and anything is
possible. I see myself as a custodian. The EOA is 40
years old and it’s my turn to be the guardian of that
and take it to the next stage so it is better than it was
when I started.
news
We’ve relaunched our membership,
offering member-owners more opportunity to
help us plot the future of our independent coverage
of the co-operative movement.
Find out more at:
thenews.coop/join
JULY 2017 | 25

STRUCTURE, ACCOUNTABILITY
AND THE GRENFELL TRAGEDY
HOUSING
BY JAKE STANNING
Organisational structure is boring. In the coming
months and years, as the failures that led to the
tragic, avoidable inferno at Grenfell Tower are
investigated, there will be many dramatic moments.
There will be villains and heroes, we will
learn of a chain of errors, each compounding
the previous; political careers will rise or fall,
and if the investigation is rigorous and complete,
we will enjoy the downfall of those who did not
care enough.
What will never be exciting is the question of
organisational structure. Yet perusal of the blog
of Grenfell Action Group, and some knowledge of
the borough and of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant
Management Organisation (KCTMO), shows that a
major link in the chain of failure is KCTMO and its
designed lack of accountability.
The TMO first came to my attention when I was
doing work in the borough that brought me into
contact with residents. KCTMO is universally hated
by those it houses. The hatred goes beyond the
usual suspicion of residents towards those who
have power over them. KCTMO has for years been
an unaccountable and deeply resented part of
life for many Kensington and Chelsea residents. I
have not met one resident with a good word to say
for ‘their’ TMO. It was therefore unsurprising to
read on Grenfell Action Group’s blog how deeply
unresponsive they had found the organisation to
their repeated complaints – on multiple grounds –
about fire safety in the block.
Unresponsiveness from their providers is very
familiar to many who live in social housing.
They live under the regimes of ALMOs (Arms-
Length Management Organisations) and housing
associations, the democratic components of which
are weak to non-existent. And the excuse for that
has been a neoliberal technocratic insistence that
the local authority will never innovate and will
never provide good services, while independent
companies will.
The result has been organisations utterly
unaccountable to those they serve, with many
housing associations increasingly acting more like
profit-seeking companies than providers of public
goods. In particular, the larger housing associations
formed through mergers over the years seem to
many residents to be a law unto themselves.
So here’s a question we could ask independently
of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower: why should
people have to put up with so little control over
their living conditions? Why should they have to
put up with organisations more interested in profit
than in housing them safely? Why have successive
governments been making housing organisations
less accountable rather than more accountable?
26 | JULY 2017

Isn’t that a sign of contempt for those who live
in social housing? Isn’t it a sign of the lack of
respect and lack of care towards residents? Isn’t
that a political decision? Do people deserve this
unresponsiveness and lack of accountability in
their housing?
Ironically, it is Tenant Management Organisations
(TMOs) that could provide a part of the solution to the
problem of unaccountable housing organisations.
A TMO is a democratic organisation, structured in
a similar way to a housing co-operative. The latter
is a superior level of democratic control, for a longterm
housing association will usually own the
property in which its members live, while a TMO
only manages the properties owned by someone
else – usually the local authority. So if TMOs are
meant to be democratic, what went wrong in
Kensington and Chelsea?
A clue to the residents’ hatred of the TMO can be
read between the lines of the press release by the
National Federation of TMOs: “KCTMO is a unique
TMO due to its size and governance model, being
that it runs the entire housing stock for the local
council, which the overwhelming majority of TMOs
don’t.”
A couple of years ago I asked a stalwart of the
housing co-operative movement, also an aficionado
of TMOs as a democratic management method,
about KCTMO. He rolled his eyes. “They ignored all
the advice from people who understood TMOs,” he
said. The idea that you could put all the housing
of a borough in one huge structure, as Kensington
and Chelsea did, was laughable to those who
understood TMOs. These democratic organisations
function well if they cover a block or a few blocks,
but they are not structured to deal with largescale
housing management. The Royal Borough of
Kensington and Chelsea cobbled together their own
ersatz TMO, one too large and remote to ever truly
be democratic, one that the experts in TMOs knew
would not work. It was this ‘TMO’ that ignored the
warnings of Grenfell Action Group.
In fact, the very existence of Grenfell Action
Group tells you that KCTMO has failed. I live
in a housing co-operative and there, as in any
functioning housing co-operative or TMO, if the
committee is failing to do what the residents
want, the committee will be changed. That’s what
democracy means. I have never heard of a truly
co-operative organisation that requires action
committees to try and push changes. Voting is the
mechanism that should work to create change in a
democratic organisation.
There were many other ways to structure housing
management in Kensington and Chelsea, but we
should be clear that most of them would have been
just as bad. They would have been undemocratic
and unresponsive. That is the standard in social
housing management. But there are hundreds of
functioning housing co-operatives and TMOs in
London alone, providing a democratic beacon of
how social housing can be run.
Talking about structure is not as exciting as
calling for Gavin Barwell (former Conservative
housing minister and current Downing Street chief
of staff) to resign or demanding that the Tories
admit to their failures on social housing, but it is
vital if we care about the everyday experience of
those living in social housing.
Let’s talk about how reasonable it is to demand
democracy in housing, let’s talk about people’s
right to control their own environment, their homes
most of all. Grenfell Action Group should not have
been ignored, but its existence should never have
been necessary in the first place.
KCTMO should be restructured as a matter of
urgency, but let’s not stop there: millions of people
are living under ALMOs and housing associations
that ignore them. Let’s give people democratic
control over their own housing, not just because it
will save lives – though it may well do – but because
that’s what people deserve.
“”
INTERESTED IN PROFIT THAN IN HOUSING THEM SAFELY?
u A version of this article was originally
published on opendemocracy.net
tp On 14 June Grenfell
Tower, a 24-storey high
tower block of public
housing flats in North
Kensington, was severely
damaged by fire. The
presumed total number
of deaths so far is 79
WHY SHOULD PEOPLE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH SO LITTLE
CONTROL OVER THEIR LIVING CONDITIONS? WHY SHOULD
THEY HAVE TO PUT UP WITH ORGANISATIONS MORE
JULY 2017 | 27

CO-OPS COME TOGETHER
TO INNOVATE ON ENERGY
‘Energy co-ops are in a bullish mood and
are focused on sector-wide growth’
ENERGY
BY PAUL MONAGHAN
Sustainability adviser to
Co-operative Energy
q Energy co-ops are
playing an important
role in the switch to
renewable sources
Last week, I attended the General Assembly of
REScoop – the European federation of renewable
energy co-operatives on behalf of Co-op Energy
and also as an elected director of Community
Energy England.
One of the discussion points was that around
half of the European Union population will be
producing their own energy in the next 40 years,
according to the European Renewable Energies
Federation.
The figures predict that over 264 million European
citizens could produce their own energy in 2050,
meeting 45% of Europe’s electricity demand. The
discussion was all very upbeat and heartening,
although all gains made to date are still in play,
with legislative proposals subject to amendments
from the European Parliament in the near future.
The Assembly meeting took place on 12
June at the University of Girona’s Science and
Technology Park, which acts as the home of Spain’s
inspirational energy co-op, Som Energia. The co-op
has recently raised in excess of €2m for solar, wind
and energy projects at a time when there is not only
zero support from national government, but a host
of obstacles.
The Assembly kicked off with the heartening
news that REScoop has grown to 39 members from
across Europe, six of whom are from the UK – and
include Co-op Energy, Community Energy England,
Energy4All and Carbon Coop.
The mood of the meeting was bullish given
REScoop’s influence in the EU corridors of power
in Brussels and Strasbourg has never been higher.
Advocacy work is strong and growing, as witnessed
by the central role of the “citizen” in the EU’s
energy proposals of December 2016 (for example in
the new Renewables Directive).
Previously, community energy was not
recognised at all in EU legislation – and now we are
seeing the emergence of citizen rights to participate
in renewables production and other activities
across the energy system.
The European Commission is now even on
record as saying: “Our vision is of an Energy
Union with citizens at its core, where citizens take
ownership of the energy transition, benefit from
new technologies to reduce their bills, participate
actively in the market, and where vulnerable
consumers are protected.”
Dirk Vansintjan, the president of REScoop,
thinks the omens have never been better, saying:
“The presence of so many of the REScoop members
from across Europe reflects the growing importance
of the impact of the federation, not only on the
grassroots level but also on the ‘Brussels’ level.”
The Assembly also received updates on the
impact of a number of cross-border projects:
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
REScoop Plus is a three-year EU-funded project
promoting energy efficiency as a value creating
activity across Europe and is well advanced.
The project involves energy co-ops (such as
France’s enercoop and Belgium’s ecopower)
across eight countries and aims to build a toolbox
to enable others to implement energy efficiency
services to their members. Best practices have
been newly identified and these will now be
28 | JULY 2017

scrutinised and used to build tools for energy
co-ops across Europe.
A prime mover in REScoop Plus is Siward Zomer,
who said: “In REScoop Plus we are researching the
energy saving of members of energy co-ops.
The data research is showing that among
members, REScoops achieve up to 20% energy
savings. Another goal is the dissemination of this
knowledge to other REScoops. Technical tools and
energy-saving approaches are in high demand with
other REScoops who are now taking up energy
savings among members as an important aspect of
the organisation.”
SUSTAINABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT
MECISE (Mobilising European Citizens to Invest in
Sustainable Energy) is looking how to encourage
and enable access to finance, and involves six
co-ops (one of which is the UK’s Energy4All) from
four member states.
It aims to create an investment portfolio that
leads to €110m being deployed in support of
renewables and energy efficiency. It is reaching
out to municipalities and the opportunities for cofinance:
such as with the six large turbines that
Belgium’s ecopower is moving forward with the
communities of Amel and Bullingen.
SMART GRIDS
WiseGRID aims to provide a set of solutions and
technologies to increase the smartness, stability
and security of an open, consumer-centric
European energy grid.
ELECTRIC CARS
A REScoop Mobility Network is looking at pairing
electric vehicle car pools with energy generation
co-operatives.
Delegates also heard from countries across Europe,
which gave an overview of national initiatives.
Netherlands is still enjoying strong community
energy growth – where community solar-PV tripled
in 2016, and wind is set to double over the next
12 months.
Citizen-owned energy projects in Germany have
just won the vast bulk (95%) of contracts in an
800MW onshore wind energy auction – although
it is not yet clear how many of these are energy
co-operatives.
In Spain and France, Som Energia and enercoop
respectively continue to grow, with now some
50,000 customers each.
Denmark continues to be light years ahead of
district heating: with co-ops entering locales with
package solutions and low finance loans and
realising carbon dioxide savings of two tonnes
carbon dioxide per household per annum.
In the UK, Co-op Energy now has a stonking
400,000 customers – and the business more than
40 power purchase agreements in place with
community energy generators.
And perhaps most exciting of all at this
year’s Assembly was the emergence of crossborder
support being provided from one energy
co-operative to another.
There was a real sense of solidarity reaching
across countries; be that the UK’s Co-op Energy
sharing its Power Purchase Agreement approach
with Spain’s Som Energia, or Belgium’s ecopower
providing the financial guarantees that enabled
France’s enercoop to unlock bank finance.
p Projects include
the development of a
more consumer-centred
electricity grid (left) and
electric car pools
JULY 2017 | 29

CO-OP ETHOS:
NO ONE IS
LEFT BEHIND
INTERNATIONAL DAY
OF CO-OPERATIVES
BY ANCA VOINEA
On 1 July co-operators around the world will
celebrate the International Day of Co-operatives.
This year’s theme is inclusion, with the slogan:
Co-operatives ensure no one is left behind.
The day, observed on the first Saturday of July, was
started by the International Co-operative Alliance
in 1923. Its theme is chosen by the Committee for
the Promotion and Advancement of Co-operatives
(COPAC), currently chaired by the International
Labour Organisation (ILO).
COPAC also includes the Alliance, the UN
Department of Economic and Social Affairs
(UNDESA), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) and the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO).
In 1994, following engagement with
COPAC, the UN recognised and
reaffirmed that co-operatives
have an important role to
play in the economic, social
and cultural development
and proclaimed a UN
International Day of
Co-operatives to be
celebrated for the first
time in 1995, marking the
centenary of the Alliance.
The Alliance said
co-operatives provided
a space where all people,
regardless of race, gender,
culture, social background or
economic circumstances could
meet their needs and build better
communities. But what makes co-ops uniquely
placed to promote such inclusion?
A 2015 brief from the ILO highlights how co-ops
provide an advantage for people with disabilities,
both as employers and as service providers.
Coordinated data on the number of people with
disabilities working for co-ops is not available.
However, the ILO points out that, increasingly,
p Brazil’s Especial Coop serves clients with disabilities
co-ops encourage active involvement of people with
disabilities in the management of their enterprise,
such as social co-ops in Italy, which employ over
35,000 workers from disadvantaged groups.
Another example is French co-op TitiFloris,
which specialises in transportation services for
people with disabilities. In addition, 60 of its 350
employees have disabilities, and the co-op was a
prize winner in 2014 for workplace inclusion.
In Brazil, Especial Coop Taxi provides services to
physically disabled persons with a dedicated fleet
and drivers trained to understand clients’ needs.
And in the USA, the National Federation of
Community Development Credit Unions has teamed
up with Disability Outreach Network to give people
with disabilities access to financial services.
Spanish co-op Manchalan – part of Mondragon,
the world’s largest federation of worker co-ops –
provides services including industrial assembly
work, plastics injection, and direct marketing and
contact centre services for client companies. It
strives to deliver social benefit by helping people
with disabilities integrate into the workplace, and
around 90% of the workforce have disabilities.
On gender, a 2015 report by the ILO says co-ops
should enhance their capacity to empower
30 | JULY 2017

women by working with civil society and gaining
government recognition. Based on surveys and
interviews with experts and practitioners from the
co-op, labour and women’s movements, the report
suggests that within the co-op movement there is a
growing attention to gender issues, a progression of
women into leadership roles, and an increase in the
number of women-owned co-ops. ILO research also
finds strong links between women’s involvement in
co-ops and poverty reduction.
Last year ICMIF, the International Co-operative
and Mutual Insurance Federation, published a study
showing that in 2010, around 14.3% of its members’
directors were women – up from 11.5% in 2005. It
also showed that in 2010, one in four members had
three or more women sitting on their boards, and
14% had a woman CEO. Nine of the largest 100 co-op
and mutual insurers in the world have women
CEOs, while only one of the top 100 stock company
insurers globally is led by a woman.
Similarly, research by CICOPA shows that in
France, 25% of worker co-ops are managed by
women – seven points more than in traditional
enterprises. In Spain women account for 50% of the
jobs in co-operatives.
In 2012, FAO published a report looking at the
role of agricultural co-ops in gender equality. The
study shows that co-ops can play important roles
in overcoming the barriers faced by women and in
supporting small agricultural producers. Efficient
co-ops empower their members economically and
socially, it says, and create sustainable employment
through equitable and inclusive business models
that are more resilient to shocks.
Informal employment also continues to represent
a considerable share of the global economy and
workforce, accounting for 82% of non-agricultural
employment in South Asia, 22% in Sub-Saharan
Africa, 65% in East and Southeast Asia and 51% in
Latin America. Co-operative models are often used
to enable workers to transition from the informal to
the formal economy, improving the lives of workers.
An ILO report highlights how co-ops offer workers
the means of gaining legal recognition.
The organisation is working in a number of
countries, leading projects that aim to support
workers by providing training and assistance for
the creation and administration of co-operatives.
Co-ops also help by providing services for workers
in the informal economy. In India, mobile preschool
services and co-operatives for social and
child care, including family co-operatives, have
been developed to respond to the needs of working
parents in the informal economy.
In recent years, co-ops have enjoyed increased
recognition from EU bodies regarding their
contribution to development. EU member states
recently signed a joint strategy for the future of
European development which includes several
mentions of the co-operative movement.
In its three mentions of co-ops, the document
highlights their role as key actors in international
development and the implementation of the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The new
Consensus on Development says “co-operatives …
have become instrumental partners in reaching the
most vulnerable and marginalised people”. The
EU also pledges to promote co-ops, to boost the
provision of local services as well as inclusive and
green business models.
With research showing how co-ops contribute
to inclusion by providing employment, equal
opportunities and services for the disadvantages,
the International Day of Co-operatives is a chance
the movement to demonstrate its achievements.
COPAC is organising the celebration at the UN
building in New York during the High-level Political
Forum for Sustainable Development. The forum will
be an opportunity for governments and UN officials
to review the implementation of the SDGs.
u Turn the page for case studies on co-op inclusion.
p The co-operative
movement’s
achievements on
inclusion, in areas such
as gender and disability,
will be celebrated
around the world,
including an event at the
UN building in New York
JULY 2017 | 31

Local sourcing
A recent study shows women account for 30% of
the food and drink manufacturing workforce in the
UK. East of England Co-operative is determined that
both small producers – and the women involved –
aren’t left behind.
In 2007, the society began working with suppliers
across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk to bring local
products to customers. This month, the society
is celebrating 10 years of Sourced Locally by
showcasing 10 of its women producers.
All are deeply involved in their businesses, from
managing farms to leading their own companies and
creating new products – and all have their produce
stocked in East of England Co-op food stores as part
of the Sourced Locally initiative.
Rebecca Miles, who runs Lane Farm near
Woodbridge in Suffolk with her parents Sue and Ian
Whitehead, produces home-reared pork products
and has been part of Sourced Locally from the start.
“The co-op has always been supportive of me as a
young person in the industry and is always looking
to learn more about us to help promote our brand,”
says Rebecca.
For her, gender has never been a barrier in the
industry, which she joined after being encouraged
by another woman studying agriculture.
Her mother, Sue, believes the relationship with
the co-op is positive and helps small businesses
like theirs in a number of ways. “The impact East
of England has on local business is really fantastic.
Over 200 local producers are growing because of
their support and their ethos is completely centred
around this commitment to local produce.”
Lane Farm won East of England’s Producer of the
Year award in 2014, and Sue believes it helped sales
“as the recognition this brings speaks for itself”.
“It’s so important that local suppliers receive this
support and promotion and I think consumers want
this choice,” she adds. “More people want to know
where their food comes from, and schemes like
Sourced Locally allow this. By continuing to buy
local, people are creating their own food security –
support your local farms and there will always be
food on the shelves.”
She has witnessed a real change in the farming
industry over the years. “Even as recently as twenty
years ago there were hardly any women running
farms, but all roles are so accessible now and we
work with a number of local businesswomen who
are running successful farms,” she says.
“The food industry is a good place to be, we will
always need to eat. The rewards of seeing people
enjoying your produce make it all worthwhile.”
p East of England’s Sourced Locally producers Emily French, Rebecca Miles
and Sue Whitehead, Louise Jones, Sarah Savage, Fiona Brice, Deborah Coe
and Stephany Hardingham, Laura Strathern and Hannah Marriage
Photo: Jenny Lewis Make-up/hair: Margo Holder
Co-operation at home
In Wales, the government has been working with the Welsh Co-operative Centre
to enable more people to collectively own and manage their accommodation.
The Welsh government sees co-ops as playing a key role in providing
20,000 affordable homes. Interest in the co-operative housing model has been
growing since 2012 when the Wales Co-operative Centre began delivering
its Co-operative Housing project, funded by Welsh government and the
Nationwide Foundation.
Over the past few years, four new co-op housing schemes have been
completed, with three others nearing completion and a further six at various
stages of development. More than 130 new homes – the majority affordable –
have been built since the Co-operative Housing project began in 2012.
In 2016/17, the project worked with nine co-operative housing schemes at
various stages of development and trained 129 people to become active and
engaged co-operative housing members.
The Welsh government recently announced it would invest an additional
£149,530 to support the project.
Michaela Adams, a member of Taf Fechan Housing Co-operative, says:
“The co-op is an excellent idea as it makes you come together as a community.
You gain and learn new skills and meet new people. We also get to resolve any
issues as a group and all get an equal vote on how things should be done.”
Luana Dee, a member of Loftus Village Association, says: “It’s been excellent
working together as a community to develop Loftus Village Association. We are
the sort of community where people help each other out and I’m particularly
enjoying developing our communal garden.”
David Palmer, manager of the Co-operative Housing project, said the
co-op model “enables people who are excluded from the mainstream housing
market to come together with others to share costs. This makes the housing
more affordable for all and enables people to secure a home of their own.
“We’re also finding that the training and experience people get through
being members of a housing co-operative are giving them transferable skills.”
32 | JULY 2017

Returning to society
In Argentina, a co-operative set up by prisoners is helping ex-offenders
reintegrate in the labour market. Inmates at a jail in La Plata set up Kbrones
textile co-op in 2009, after taking part in a workshop on how to make leather
goods, which helped them gain the skills they now use in their work.
“We came up with the idea of setting up a co-op so that we could have a job
when we got released,” says Julio Fuque, secretary and founder member. “We
had the chance to learn in prison – we transformed the negative to a positive
because we understood that we could build something with our hands, help
each other and our families and reintegrate into society.”
In prison, the group learnt how to manufacture leather goods and on their
release they decided to work in the textile industry. The co-op is now producing
over 2,500 products a month including shirts, vests, trousers and playsuits.
During this process the founding members worked with the country’s national
federation of worker co-operatives (FECOOTRA), which helped them set
up the co-op. They also received financial support from the national Social
Development Ministry to buy their first machinery and supplies.
The co-op currently includes 22 worker members, most of them ex-offenders.
Others are seamstresses who joined later after having worked in clandestine
textile factories in the informal economy.
The success of the initiative led to creation of the programme Co-operatives
in Prison, which aims to develop similar initiatives across the country. Kbrones
products were also in the spotlight with the Argentine co-operative movement’s
visit to Vatican back in 2013.
Ariel Guarco, the president of Cooperar, the national trade body for co-ops,
gave Pope Francis a leather Thermos flask holder produced by the co-op. The
bag has inscribed the message “co-operatives build dignity”.
Mr Fuque says the co-op aims to help set up similar projects and teach
prisoners about the co-operative model. “The co-operative movement is what
gave us an identity,” he said, adding that the co-op had helped in the inclusion
process of those wishing to change.
Health and age
Singapore’s healthcare system faces the challenge
of an ageing population, with the number of
people aged 65 and older expected to double from
430,000 to more than 900,000 in 2030. Co-ops
providing services for the elderly are continuing
to emerge across different sectors, including
healthcare and wellbeing.
One of these is NTUC Health, which has
developed an integrated care model for seniors.
In February it opened a new senior care centre,
which includes a medical clinic, dental clinic
and pharmacy. It provides services and facilitates
transfer of seniors between day care to nursing
homes or home care. The approach enables
doctors, dentists, pharmacists, therapists, nurses
and carers to work together to serve seniors better.
NTUC Chair Lim Boon Heng said: “There is great
synergy to be derived as the team works together
to provide prompt and person-centred care for
our seniors. As NTUC Health continues to expand
and extend its range of senior wellness and care
options, it will work towards an integrated care
model that connects seniors seamlessly across
services that are appropriate to their needs.”
One of the seniors benefiting from the
approach is 63-year old Toh Kwee Heng, who
suffered a stroke in December 2015. He was left
partially paralysed and spent three months in
hospital. His family decided to enrol him in the
NTUC Health Nursing Home at Jurong West. With
the support of therapists, he was able to walk
again without assistance and discharged. He
intends to continue the therapy to regain muscle
strength and has signed up for rehabilitation
services at the Silver Circle senior care centre at
Jurong West. The recovery was facilitated by the
good communication between therapists at the
nursing home and the senior care centre.
The co-op is also running an intergenerational
programme between pre-schoolers and seniors,
enabling them to participate in common activities
and learn about one another.
For this project NTUC Health has partnered
with NTUC First Campus, a co-op childcare
provider. Both enterprises are part of the NTUC
group and are located close to each other.
The initial findings suggest the initiative
helps improve the seniors’ emotional health
while giving children the chance to interact with
seniors. Mr Chua Song Khim, chief executive of
NTUC Health said participating in these activities
helped seniors strengthen their cognition and
physical functions.
JUNE 2017 | 33

The Co-op News Big
Debate: How co-ops show
concern for communities
CONCERN FOR
COMMUNIITIES
BY ANTHONY MURRAY
CASE STUDIES :
KATE DUGGAN AND
ANCA VOINEA
Concern for the community has always been on the
agenda for co-operatives.
And it can happen in two different ways:
Co-operatives as businesses may work with
communities to solve local problems, for example
through fundraising, providing grants or
volunteers. Alternatively, organisations such as
the Plunkett Foundation provide the means for
communities to come together in a co-operative
structure to solve their problems, which could be
setting up a new bus service or running a local
village store.
Either way, Concern for Community is the seventh
co-operative principle. And while the International
Co-operative Alliance only formally adopted it in
1995, the community has always been a part of a
co-op’s ethos.
Co-operatives today are already making changes
and creating positive impacts on the communities
that they serve. Last year, the Community Impact
Index, published by Co-operative News, showed
the top nine retail co-ops gave 10% of their profits
to the community – compared with just 4.5% for
corporate rivals.
Co-ops have had a head start and can afford to
give more back to the community. But today it’s
relatively normal for companies to have similar
social values to co-ops.
In the late 1990s, the Global Reporting Initiative
set about its mission to educate traditional
businesses about the importance of social
responsibility. As part of its remit, the body has set
the standards for sustainability reporting.
Those standards are in use around the world –
and recently, GRI interviewed some business and
social responsibility leaders to imagine what will
be necessary for sustainability in 2025.
One of the primary outcomes from the research
is the need to be collaborative. In its Sustainability
and Reporting Trends in 2025 report, it says a new
generation of growth and development models will
be at the centre of discussions in the next decade.
1. The Platform –
helping put people
back into work
p The team at the Platform includes chief executive Julie Rossiter
(centre) and Fiona Ras, business development director (far right)
WHAT IS THE SOCIAL ISSUE?
The unemployement rate is currently at its lowest
since the 1970s – but there are still more than 1.5
million people without jobs in the UK. The rise of
zero-hours contracts is leaving thousands more
stuck in a situation where they’re technically
employed, but may not earn a sustainable living.
An increasing number of people are choosing
to set up their own business. Last year, there were
two million more private sector businesses than
there were in 2000. And some of those people are
addressing not just their own needs, but those of
their community as well. There are believed to be
more than 60,000 social enterprises in the UK,
employing some 800,000 people and contributing
£24bn to the UK economy.
While the sector is booming, launching a social
enterprise can be challenging. Publications and
online guides can only go so far. Sometimes what
you really need is advice and support from people
who have already been on the journey.
34 | JULY 2017

In the report, it said: “The most mentioned
models were the circular economy, shared economy,
collaborative economy and green economy as
references in the discussions around solutions in
the next decade.
“New concepts for energy production (e.g.
decentralisation) and the need to develop
environmentally friendly energy models were
mentioned as an ingredient needed in the models
of the next decade, to tackle climate change,
increasing demand for clean energy and promote
production decentralisation and wider access.”
The need to work collaboratively was also
recognised by Marina Migliorato, head of corporate
social responsibility at Spanish energy company
Enel. In the interview, she said: “We need to partner
together – business, governments and all other
players – because the problems that we will face in
the next decade will be crucial. The solution will
be global: we need global actions from the diverse
stakeholders in our society because it will be
extremely challenging to achieve these important
goals in the few years we have.”
The impact of a business on its community is
worth noting, according to the report. It says “there
is a perception that the next decade’s innovation
boost will probably be driven by the need to tackle
real, concrete and urgent social, environmental,
governance and other issues, and may be inspired
by the desire to design new business models”.
Paul Simpson, chief executive of CDP, which
encourages investors to support a sustainable
economy, said: “We’ve been valuing companies
for hundreds of years by looking at their profit.
Currency, of course, is still one measure of value –
it’s the quantitative value, and it’s easy to measure.
But we know that, in our rapidly changing world,
approaching or exceeding planetary boundaries
and reaching a population of 9 billion by 2050, the
winning companies of the future will be generating
value in different ways.”
The guidance notes which accompany the Co-op
Principles outline how and why co-operatives have
concern for the community.
“Co-operatives are characterised by and proud of
the fact they are rooted in local communities,” says
the document.
“They are set up by the people to meet their
common economic needs within communities for
buying quality food and services at an affordable
price, marketing local produce and creating local
jobs, obtaining credit and insurance and other
services.
“Limited only by their financial capacity to
do so, many co-operatives have demonstrated a
remarkable capacity to care for others and have
made significant contributions to the human and
financial resources of their communities.
“Co-operatives also have a long history and proud
tradition of meeting social needs by delivering
services such as health, housing, education,
social services, integrating people who are socially
disadvantaged into work, and helping community
development.”
How do co-ops do this and put it into action?
Read our three case studies looking at the social
issues that co-ops help solve for communities...
u If you’re attending
this year’s Co-op
Congress in Wakefield,
join us for our Big
Debate on Friday 30
June at Unity Works
(2.30pm) or read
the report after the
event: thenews.coop/
bigdebate
WHAT ARE CO-OPS DOING?
The Platform is a multi-stakeholder co-operative that describes
itself as a social enterprise hub. Based in Brighton and Hove,
it has employee members, supporter members and community
members. This year it launched the SEEK Project, which will help
unemployed people to start a social enterprise or co-operative.
Fiona Ras, business development director at the Platform,
explains: “The SEEK Project will empower people with the firsthand
experience of social problems to adopt a solution-focused
and enterprising approach to tackling the issues affecting their
local communities and environment. We are really excited to
empower people who are not in work to bring about positive
change that will have a lasting impact.”
The SEEK Project launched in January 2017 and is being
delivered in partnership with Unltd, the University of Chichester,
Croydon Council and Start Up Croydon. The first applicants have
been given help to develop their ideas, before pitching them to
a small panel. 15 people were selected for the first programme.
Over the course of each six-month programme, participants
will benefit from: a one-week intensive training course; a £500
start-up fund; help with planning; a business mentor; monthly
workshops; four days of work shadowing a social enterprise
leader; peer-to-peer support; networking; and travel and
childcare costs. Following the programme, participants will also
be able to access a package of ongoing support.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT?
The SEEK Project is being funded by a grant of £351,000 from the
Big Lottery Fund and the European Social Fund. Over the next
three years, the project is aiming to help 45 people to set up
social enterprises. Those social enterprises could then benefit
hundreds of more people in local communities.
HOW CAN OTHER CO-OPS LEARN FROM THE PLATFORM?
The £500 grant for participants in The SEEK Project is relatively
small. However, the advice and support they’ll receive are
worth far more. They’ll meet other social entrepreneurs, build
relationships, and be put in touch with organisations that can
help them on their journey.
u Find out more at www.theplatform.org.uk.
JULY 2017 | 35

2. Providing key
healthcare services:
employee-owned
City Health Care
Partnership
WHAT IS THE SOCIAL ISSUE?
With the British Red Cross warning that rising demand will create a
humanitarian crisis for the NHS, the need for alternative local healthcare
providers is increasing.
The Red Cross isn’t the only organisation to sound the alarm. A report by
the House of Lords Committee also raised fears about the future of health
and adult social care, as it made fresh calls for integrated health and social
care.
And a 2017 study by the Care Quality Commission described the NHS as
standing on a burning platform. It said the model of acute care that worked
well when the NHS was established cannot deliver the care needed by the
current population.
WHAT ARE CO-OPS DOING?
Employee-owned City Health Care Partnership is working to address these
issues, designing healthcare services that minimise the need for acute care
in hospitals through early interventions, community-based treatment and
promotion of healthy lifestyles.
A community interest company, CHCP allows permanent staff to buy a £1
share in the business. It employs around 1,900 people in Hull, East Riding,
Lincolnshire, Knowsley, Wigan and St Helens.
The company was spun off from the reorganised NHS in 2010 through the
Right to Request programme, with around 1,000 employees choosing to buy
a £1 share. As shareholders, they can attend the annual general meeting,
sit on the executive board or the Community Partnership Forum, and be
trustees of the CHCP Foundation.
The business offers more than 80 services in community settings,
including end of life, district nursing, TB clinics, community paediatric
nursing, health visitors, school nurses, sexual health, dentistry, public
health, prison health, GP practices, minor injury units, eating disorders
and psychological wellbeing. All profits are reinvested in the business,
its colleagues or the local community through its charity, City Health Care
Partnership Foundation.
CHCP works in partnership with a number of healthcare organisations,
including Hull Clinical Commissioning Group, Hull and East Yorkshire
Hospitals, NHS Humber Foundation Trust, Yorkshire Ambulance Services
and East Riding of Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Group. It also runs a
Community Partnership Forum, which sees various external community and
voluntary organisations meet three times a year to offer external input.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT?
p The community children’s nursing team
has achieved an Investing in Children
Membership Award; and staff from CHCP’s
Carers’ Information & Support Service
raised funds for the Alzheimer’s Society in
Hull on National Cupcake Day
Healthcare inspectors praised the employee-owned business for the quality
of its services. A report by the Care Quality Commission found that patients
and their relatives were consistently positive about the care they received
and commented on “kind and compassionate” staff who treated patients
with dignity.
One of the services cited for outstanding practice was end-of-life care,
which enabled patients to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions, live at
home and die in the place of their choice. Others were rated as “good”,
including community health services for adults and children, young people
and families, urgent care services and termination of pregnancy services.
City Health Care also carries out a Social Return on Investment audit – the
most recent showed a return of £38 for every £1 spent. And a user survey
showed that 96% of respondents would recommend the service based on
their overall experience.
Since 2010 CHCP has given out over £180,000 in small grants and staff
36 | JULY 2017

3. Lincolnshire Co-operative:
supporting local libraries to
build community hubs
Lincolnshire Co-operative has been involved with education in
its local community ever since it opened Lincoln’s first reading
room in 1873. It now runs three libraries, alongside its food
stores, pharmacies and post offices.
WHAT IS THE SOCIAL ISSUE?
As austerity measures tightened in 2015, Lincolnshire County
Council handed 30 libraries to volunteers to make savings of
£2m. The move was not without controversy, with residents
taking the council to the High Court and over 22,000 people
signing a petition against the closures.
Lincolnshire Co-op took no part in the discussion surrounding
the future of the libraries but, once the process was over, it
offered to take on five libraries where it had space for them.
Three of these were taken up.
“We have always understood that access to information was
an important part of people being able to fulfil their potential,”
says chief executive Ursula Lidbetter.
HOW IS LINCOLNSHIRE CO-OP HELPING?
When the future of the libraries was being debated, the co-op
received letters from some of its members. “They knew they
weren’t taking sides but were willing to help if the outcome was
that libraries run by volunteers were the way forward,” says Ms
Lidbetter.
The libraries are at the the society’s pharmacy and post office
site in Bar Lane, Waddington; its Spilsby Food Store on Post
Office Lane; and on Fleet Street, Holbeach, sharing space with
the pharmacy and post office.
Facilities include self-service machines, people’s network
computers, dedicated helplines linking to Lincolnshire County
Council’s customer services team and thousands of books.
The libraries are run by volunteers but supported by
Lincolnshire Co-operative’s staff from its food, pharmacies
and post offices on site. Co-op colleagues help with tasks such
as opening and closing libraries, supporting the volunteers,
liaising with the volunteer coordinator, supporting library
users, and banking duties.
The co-op invested £35,000 in each library to set them up,
and the council provides around £5,000 per year towards
the running cost of each library and offered one-off grants of
£15,000 for changes to buildings or equipment.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT?
Since opening under the Lincolnshire Co-op, the libraries have
tripled the number of users.
Support from the co-op’s staff helps libraries run for longer
hours – Holbeach Library is open 50 hours a week, as opposed
p Volunteers at Holbeach Library
to 18 when it was run by the council. In its first week after
opening, Holbeach Library had 824 visitors and 601 books
issued. The number of new members joining the library has also
increased from five a week to 62 a week.
WHAT IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS?
“We think of Lincolnshire Co-operative as not just of providing
our services but actually supporting other services as well,”
said Ms Lidbetter. “Our vision is that together we are providing
and supporting valued services. Supporting the library is an
end in itself.”
“It has had a positive effect on our staff, who recognise the
support for the library is a way of supporting our organisation,”
she added. “Another benefit is that all of our volunteers are
local people from the community and it is important to us to
keep close to our communities.”
Community groups such as Home Start, district councils,
Rotary clubs and pre-schoolers can use the library for meetings.
The co-op’s funeral division also hosted funeral help coffee
mornings as part of the Dying Matters Awareness Week.
Ms Lidbetter emphasises the need to involve everybody in
the initial discussion; Lincolnshire Co-operative engaged with
the mutual Greenwich Leisure (GLL), which is now running
the back office for the libraries of Lincolnshire, as well as the
volunteers, the local community and the co-op’s staff.
“It’s important that right from the beginning you understand
all those people and get their views to suit everybody’s
requirements rather than imposing it. It’s suitable for a co-op
approach,” she said.
JULY 2017 | 37

A NATIONAL CO-OPERATIVE
DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
‘We need to build a better economy
– and we need to do it ourselves’
DEVELOPMENT
BY DAME PAULINE
GREEN
Over the last two months we have been bombarded
with messages from political parties of all stripes
about how the economy is broken, how it needs
fixing. For those of us who are involved in running
or supporting businesses in the co-operative sector,
we know this is true. We need an economy over
which we all have a say, an economy where wealth
is shared and where we all have the power to work
together to meet our needs.
We know, too, that it’s not government that will
make this happen. Policies can make it easier for
local people to take ownership of community assets
together, for example, or for farmers to market
products together. But without the demand for
co-operation in local communities or among farmers,
we are unlikely to see people taking advantage of
these opportunities to the level that will make a
difference to large swathes of the economy.
So, if we want to strengthen the co-operative
sector, to increase the demand for co-operatives, we
can’t wait for new government policies or a sudden
wave of enlightenment. We need to do it ourselves.
All of us who know that people across the country
can benefit from a more co-operative economy – we
need to start to build one.
That’s why over the last year Co-operatives UK
has been facilitating the development of a strategy
to strengthen and grow the UK’s co-op sector.
38 | JULY 2017

We have had input from 550 different
organisations who have offered information, ideas
and innovations – and we have honed these many
elements into a focused but creative strategy.
If we want to an economy in which everyone has
a say and a stake, then here’s what we need to do.
COMMIT TO BEING GREAT
Existing co-operatives are the inspiration that draw
people to starting or joining a co-op. We need co-ops
to be exemplars – in governance, in member
engagement, in making a difference. At the core of
any strategy to create a more co-operative economy
is the need for co-ops to commit to being great over
the coming years.
BE OPEN TO NEW CO-OPERATION
Co-operatives are a tool to help people take
ownership of things that matter to them. Decent
food was the issue for the Rochdale Pioneers; for
many people today it’s decent work, or saving our
environment, or securing better healthcare. We
need to be open to the new forms of co-operation
that emerge – to help and and support them so they
can grow into flourishing parts of a diverse co-op
movement.
INSPIRE MORE CO-OPERATION
If we want more people to start and join co-ops then
we need to inspire more people. All of us who know
the benefits that a co-op can bring – to individual
people, to local areas or to the economy as a whole
– can be champions or advocates, helping people
in our networks see why a co-operative option
would work for them.
Our new strategy, Do it Ourselves, sets out a host of
ways in which individuals and co-ops right across
the sector are already doing some of these things,
and how we can support and amplify them. It is
designed to work as a call for action, open also to
new ideas and new partnerships. It’s an ambitious
strategy that aims to significantly increase the
number of co-ops and their presence in society. But
it’s one that we can and must get working on. This
is where it starts.
t Dame Pauline
chaired the expert
panel that oversaw the
development of the new
strategy. The strategy
Do it Ourselves: Your
Invitation to a Future
Powered by Co-operation
will be launched at
Congress in Wakefield on
Saturday 1 July
q Strategy workshops at
Congress 2016
How did the strategy develop?
The United Kingdom has been a birthplace of co-operative
enterprise, but it is striking that a number of other countries have
been more successful in fostering a co-operative sector that can
operate at scale across the economy.
The idea of a national co-operative development strategy for
the UK is something new and is intended to promote the takeup
of the co-operative model in a context in which participatory
business models are more needed and more relevant than ever.
What is co-operative development? This is an open-ended
question that means different things to different people across a
very diverse co-operative and wider mutual and social enterprise
sector in the UK. To have a chance of success, a national cooperative
development strategy needed to engage those people
as well as new people in pursuit of a coherent set of priorities.
Co-operatives UK began working on a process bringing together
these different strands of action, with the ultimate aim of
articulating a coherent agenda and facilitating the creation of
a single strategy that could be readily adopted and actioned
by all stakeholders: Do It Ourselves – the National Co-operative
Development Strategy.
The story begins in 2013, when a national support programme,
the Co-operative Enterprise Hub, came to an abrupt end due to a
lack of resources. The board of Co-operatives UK set out to explore
the formation of a broader development strategy in response, by
commissioning a scoping report and working to establish a new
business support programme, the Hive.
On the back of this, a four-stage process was adopted for the
development of the strategy: conversation, exploration, draft
strategy, final strategy.
To ensure the National Co-operative Development Strategy had
full and fair representation from different parts of the movement,
a strategic reference panel was assembled, which had the task of
connecting with and listening to the movement over a two-year
period through engagement sessions.
The full strategy, Do it Ourselves: Your Invitation to a Future
Powered by Co-operation, will be launched at Congress in
Wakefield on 1 July,
JULY 2017 | 39

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP
The business model of the future?
Employee Ownership Day on 30 June is aiming
to raise awareness of a fast-growing sector which
employs around 200,000 people in the UK with an
annual turnover of up to £40 billion.
According to the Employee Ownership
Association, there are around 300 employeeowned
businesses – and the number is growing at
a rate of 10% every year.
The most common route into employee
ownership is when private owners decide to sell
the business to their workforce. In many instances,
these are fiercely independent family concerns who
don’t want to merge with big corporates.
“Most of these organisations are not worker
co-operatives or necessarily aligned with co-op
principles in their purest form but they are definitely
in the same family of business recognising the
importance of people and values,” says Deb
Oxley, chief executive of the Employee Ownership
Association.
“We talk about ourselves as being part of a wider
family which includes mutuals and alternative
business structures. It’s about how you engage
individuals and give them a purposeful stake in the
business in which they work, bringing together key
stakeholders.”
The Employee Ownership Association has
its roots in commercially operated successful
independent businesses which are more
progressive and has a “friendly, open relationship”
with the co-op movement.
“I know [Co-operatives UK secretary general] Ed
Mayo and we spend quite a bit of time talking about
some of our shared challenges,” says Ms Oxley.
“We do not want to become fragmented, we want
to build a single narrative that helps politicians
and policymakers understand we are not niche
and not unusual. The majority of people in the UK
do not work in plcs. If we are going to influence
policymakers and politicians we have to recognise
there are different ways of running successful
businesses and there are nuances between us; we
are all in the same Venn diagram – just doing it
slightly differently. We can come together as part of
the same family with a collective endeavour.”
The growth of employee-owned businesses has
been boosted by new legislation and recent tax
incentives from the government and a demand
for more progressive forms of capitalism. There
are several models but many operate via an u
EMPLOYEE
OWNERSHIP
BY SUSAN PRESS
JULY 2017 | 41

p Deb Oxley , chief
executive of the
Employee Ownership
Association
u Almost half the shares
of Wilkin and Sons,
famous for its Tiptree
preserves, are owned by
the employees
u employee ownership trust –
often referred to as the John Lewis
model.
Ms Oxley believes the employee
ownership sector is now of a size
and scale to have a strong voice.
“There has been a landslide shift
in thinking about how we continue
to preserve the independence of
business models that are more inclusive
and engaging,” she says.
“Our model is profit-led but recognises
the importance of people instead of simply doing
what listed counterparts might do with shortterm
financial incentives. It’s a sustainable way of
delivering business.
“You implement a structure that engages and it’s
an opportunity for every employee to participate
in some sort of ownership with meaning and
relevance in the way business is managed.”
Some businesses offer employee representation
on their board, others have employee councils
– but all share what Ms Oxley calls a ‘holistic’
approach to doing business.
“We believe that employees should use capital
rather than capital using employees,” she says.
“The benchmark for many new ventures is the
‘John Lewis model’ where shares are held indirectly
on behalf of employees in a trust. Others offer share
schemes where shares are in the employees’ name
and the proportion of dividend is determined by
how many shares you own.”
“Whichever the model, our performance is
phenomenal. Between 2014-16, combined sales
increased by 10.2% and employee numbers by 15%
– compared with the overall UK employees growth
of 5.8%.”
Many employee-owned businesses are in the
retail and manufacturing sector but successful
enterprises are being set up right across the board.
They include law firm Stephens Scown, which has
300 staff across Devon and Cornwall and a turnover
of £18m.
In June 2015, bespoke bookbinders Barnard &
Westwood went from being an historic familyrun
company with a 100-year history to a 100%
employee-owned enterprise. The previous
shareholders sold all of their shares to the newly
created ‘Barnard & Westwood Employee Ownership
Trust’ which acts to safeguard all of the shares on
“”
WE BELIEVE THAT EMPLOYEES
SHOULD USE CAPITAL RATHER
THAN CAPITAL USING EMPLOYEES
behalf of all employees who are now ‘partners’
in the company. The firm has elected two trustee
representatives from the current workforce to serve
on its board.
Another example is Wilkin and Sons, famed for
its jams and preserves, which has been in business
in the Essex village of Tiptree since 1885 and
proud holders of a royal warrant from the reigning
monarch since 1911.
Through a trust, the employees control almost
half the company’s shares. Trading profits are used
to buy back shares for the employee trust so that
everyone involved is a stakeholder. The company
has always been an integral part of the local
community – it is the largest employer in Tiptree
and takes its social responsibilities seriously.
Profits are used to support local sports and arts
organisations and to improve the environment.
Each year the Tiptree Strawberry Race takes place
in June and all funds raised are donated to a charity,
usually one with local roots. Tiptree’s Youth Club
is based in the Factory Hall and the local dramatic
society has storage facilities on company premises.
As the sector grows, so does the range of
guidance and support available. Co-operatives UK
offers guidance to people interested in becoming
employee-owned businesses through its Hive
project. And part of Co-operatives UK’s National
Co-operative Development Strategy, which is being
launched at this year’s Congress at the end of June,
will be to help people like lawyers and accountants
who are in positions to advise about business
succession to be more knowledgeable about the
co-operative option.
42 | JULY 2017

Andrew Harrison, from Co-ownership Solutions,
has been involved in the employee ownership and
worker co-operative sector for over 15 years, and is
one of the Hive’s practitioners.
Since 2010 he has worked with over 30 companies,
varying in size from five to 500 employees and
across different sectors, providing expert advice
and project managing their move to employee
ownership. Mr Harrison is also independent chair
of trustees for a number of successful employeeowned
businesses and supports the sector through
his role as a trustee director of Co-operative and
Community Finance.
He says: “A lot of the work we do is as a result
of introductions through the Employee Ownership
Association. Since 2014, when legislation was
enacted to encourage business owners to consider
employee ownership, we have seen a huge increase
in the number of business owners taking steps to
transfer their business to some sort of employee
ownership structure.
“Academic research shows that employee-owned
companies are more productive and for the vast
majority of people it’s also about being able to
pass on a moral as well as a financial benefit to the
company via tax incentives.”
Andrew’s list of clients includes Eagle Plant Hire,
which has over 250 employees and 26 depots across
the country, and became an employee-owned
business in April 2016. Its employee council seeks
views on the future of the business and the first of
two employee trustee elections have taken place.
All qualifying employees have just shared in their
first bonus.
Another is Norfolk-based civil engineering
company Plandescil, which was established as
a family-run business in 1979 and transferred to
employee ownership in July 2016. It has a wide
range of clients from individuals to large-scale
international companies and has prioritised
training for young engineers as part of its strategy
to help employees reach their full potential.
And in the town of Ebbw Vale in Wales, awardwinning
packaging company Primepac Solutions
was formed in 2005 following the closure of a local
factory. It now employs between 35-50 people who
package anything from powder sachets to 1 litre
glass bottles.
“We were doing five or six transactions annually
– now it is double that,” says Mr Harrison. “There
are now a number of other advisors in this sector
and it is a true measure of how mainstream it is
becoming when lawyers and accountants are
saying they can do this kind of work.
“I work for a company in Newcastle
which has been employee-owned for
nine years and it is very successful.
I could not see why other people
would not want to replicate that. It’s
sensible for businesses to be owned
by their employees and good for the
wider UK economy. We passionately
believe that employee ownership and
worker co-operative models provide a
better and fairer way of doing business.”
p The team at Barnard &
Westwood, a fine printer
and bookbinder, which
has been employeeowned
for two years
q Andrew Harrison, from
Co-ownership Solutions
JULY 2017 | 43

THE CO-OP
CLOVERLEAF:
ONE YEAR ON
One year on from the launch of the Co-operative Group’s
new logo and membership proposition, we have yet to see
any sign of independent societies following the change.
So what’s been happening?
RETAIL
BY KATE DUGGAN
pClockwise from
above: The Co-op
Group’s new cloverleaf
logo was launched last
year; but societies such
as Central England still
use ‘The Co-operative’
branding introduced
in 2009; East of
England and Scotmid
maintain their own
individual identities;
this year Southern
Co-op has refreshed
its own visual identity
but continues to use
‘The Co-operative’ on
store fascias; while
Midcounties is trialling
the international
COOP marque
In February 2009, a multi-million pound
advertising campaign introduced the nation to a
new co-operative visual identity. Designed to create
a consistent look and feel for the UK’s consumer cooperative
societies, ‘The Co-operative’ brand was
adopted by the Co-operative Group and several of
the independent societies, including Midcounties,
Southern and Central England (above right).
Less than a decade on, the Group has reverted
to a refreshed cloverleaf logo (above), and a new
membership proposition – ‘5% for you, 1% for
your community’. Discussions are currently under
way between the Group and independent societies
regarding the re-brand.
A spokesperson from the Group told us: “We’ve
been talking to the independent societies over
the last few months to help them understand why
we’re changing and to encourage them to be part of
our plans. While no applications have been made
so far, we’re mindful that the decision to apply for
a licence sits with each individual society and is for
them to consider in their own time.”
Gemma Lacey is director of sustainability
and communications at Southern Co-operative.
She told us that, as an active participant in the
existing national co-operative brand licensing
arrangements, Southern “hopes to be in a position
to adopt the new branding more broadly (e.g. on
store fascias) in the fullness of time”.
Southern has recently refreshed its own visual
identity, including a new logo. This new identity
does not, however, affect the appearance of stores
or funeral homes. Gemma Lacey explains: “Our
new Southern Co-op brand reinforces our values
and underlying purpose as a co-operative. It helps
us to tell the story of our own independent society:
who we are, what we stand for and what makes us
different, and refreshes and strengthens the visual
impact of our corporate communications. This is
particularly from an employer brand perspective,
ensuring that we stand out as an employer with
a strong recognisable brand that reflects our
business. Our new brand has been designed to
complement either version of the trading brands.”
The Group’s refreshed cloverleaf logo supports
its new membership proposition. Members now
receive a 5% reward when they buy Co-op ownbrand
products and services, and a further 1% is
spent on supporting local causes. While marketing
materials do state that this reward doesn’t apply
to products bought from independent societies,
there is potential for confusion, as the cloverleaf
branding features on products and point of sales
materials used by the independents.
Ms Lacey adds: “We are aware of the potential
confusion for members, particularly given we are
not participating in the new Co-op brand and 5+1
membership proposition. At this stage, we are
working to ensure that our own membership offer
is clear and remains focused and relevant for our
members, to minimise any confusion.”
Societies who adopt the new brand will also need
to adopt the 5+1 membership proposition, so will
need to consider the effect on their own member
and community activities. “We are currently
reviewing whether the approach is compatible with
the future vision for our business and in the best
interests of our members,” she says.
Other societies are waiting for more information
from the Group before they make a decision.
Midcounties told us that they’re planning to review
the situation in October, when more details around
the rebranding will be available. But they are
currently trialling the international COOP marque
as a food store facia. Plus its Coop Energy business
has fully adopted the COOP marque.
It is understandable if the independent societies
need time to reflect before making any commitment.
This new logo comes less than a decade after the
last one, and rebranding doesn’t come cheap.
Gemma Lacey says: “You will appreciate that a
change such as this requires investment; we need
44 | JULY 2017

Societies who currently hold ‘The Co-operative’
branding licence or use variations:
Midcounties • Southern • Central England
•Radstock • Tamworth • Heart of England •
Hawkshead and District
Societies who maintain independent branding:
East of England • Scotmid • Channel Islands
• Lincolnshire • Chelmsford Star • Clydebank
• Allendale • Coniston • Langdale and
Neighbourhood • Wooldale (before this month’s
merger with Central England) • Grosmont
to be confident that this investment is in the best
interests of our business and our members.”
Many societies chose to keep their own
independent identity when the 2009 rebrand
took place. A spokesperson from Scotmid said:
“Scotmid, like several other societies, felt it was the
right step at the time to maintain its independent
co-operative brand, although it was actively
involved in the early stages of the brand panel.”
East of England is another society which chose
to keep its own brand. “The East of England Coop
has a very strong sense of regional heritage
and identity, so it was felt to be beneficial to
maintain an independent brand identity as the
local co-op for East Anglia,” says Minnie Moll,
joint chief executive. “There is confusion between
the different co-operative businesses, so arguably
having a different visual identity helps reassure
members and customers that they are supporting
their local co-op.”
It remains to be seen whether any of the societies
that didn’t take part in the original rebranding
exercise will now decide to adopt the cloverleaf.
“There are ongoing, very collaborative, meetings
between Group and the independent co-ops
to discuss how this would work,” says Minnie.
“The East of England Co-op has its own distinct
branding and membership proposition, which we
are happy with, but we are part of the conversation
to understand how the new branding and 5+1
proposition are working and therefore whether it
should be a consideration for us.”
So, one year on and we’re still very much in a
‘wait and see’ situation. What is clear is that the
continued collaboration between the Group and
societies is welcomed from all parties. As a Scotmid
spokesperson said: “Scotmid is watching with
interest and will await the results of the brand
and membership trials the Co-operative Group are
conducting and appreciate the spirit of openness in
which this is being carried out.”
a fair, fresh approach, for all

Co-op Group eyes take-over of mutual Nisa
RETAIL
BY PAUL GOSLING
A bidding war is taking place between Sainsbury’s
and the Co-operative Group to acquire Nisa – the
Northern Independent Supermarkets Association
which is itself a co-operative of grocery traders.
Nisa provides a franchise model across 3,466
convenience stores, owned by 1,300 members.
It might be assumed that owners of a mutual
would prefer to sell to another mutual. But,
according to the Financial Times, Sainsbury’s
is offering a bigger price, thought to be around
£2,500 for each one of the almost 60,000 shares.
(Sainsbury’s declined to comment, telling us:
“Afraid we don’t comment on market speculation.”)
“The Sainsbury’s offer was unanimously
considered to be superior with more cash upfront,
more certainty and more flexibility in what it offers
members,” one person ‘familiar with the process’
was quoted by the FT as saying.
Nisa is also not discussing the proposed
acquisition – it failed to respond to our request
for comment. But a sale offers a solution to a
difficult financial situation. The business reported
an underlying loss of £5.4m in 2015, which turned
into a £0.6m profit last year. The loss was the result
of losing a contract to supply the Costcutter chain
after the latter’s owners were rejected in their
attempt to buy Nisa in 2013. (Costcutter offered
£134m – similar to what Sainsbury’s are reportedly
offering now.)
Nisa is a sensible target for both Sainsbury’s
and the Co-op Group. It is widely recognised in the
grocery trade that the convenience store sector is
where much of any future growth resides, especially
in an increasingly ‘time poor’ society.
Shoppers are more often now buying for the
next meal rather than trying to buy all the food
and supplies for the next week. Convenience
groceries is a niche where Tesco has established a
strong presence, which is set to grow even stronger
through its recent acquisition of Booker’s (which
owns about 5,000 Premier, Londis, Budgens and
Family Shopper branded stores).
However, there is some confusion over
Sainsbury’s growth strategy since its former chief
executive Justin King departed two years ago. The
company entered into a joint venture with Danish
low-cost chain Netto to compete against the Lidl
and Aldi brands, but then pulled out of the project
after just two years, closing the 16 stores the
partnership had opened. It reportedly concluded
that it could not achieve the scale necessary to
properly compete.
The rationale for the pull-back was also to enable
Sainsbury’s to focus on its acquisition of the Argos
brand. Sainsbury’s believes that Argos’s expertise
in home deliveries provides a more lucrative
direction for the business.
But the reported bid for Nisa suggests that
Sainsbury’s is also heading towards expanding
its convenience store operation. For any grocery
business that does want to expand its presence in
that sector, opportunities are apparently limited.
46 | JULY 2017

Most prime locations are already occupied. While
Sainsbury’s has been seeking new stores, it has
hit a ceiling via organic growth with only 25 new
Sainsbury’s convenience stores scheduled to open
this year.
It is an arguably even more important opportunity
for the Co-operative Group, which restricts itself in
terms of grocery retailing to convenience stores.
It has long been seeking additional outlets, but
organic growth can be a slow process.
Adding another 3,500 stores would bring
substantial benefits to the Group in terms of
economies of scale as well as £1.4bn in turnover.
Ironically, the Nisa chain includes 90 former Co-op
stores which McColl’s bought from the Co-op Group
last year.
It is unclear exactly how a Sainsbury’s deal
would be structured – whether the stores would
all be owned by the giant retailer, or if it would
operate as a franchise with existing Nisa members
becoming Sainsbury’s franchisees. While some
inside Nisa say that the detail of the Sainsbury’s
offer was better for its members, others disagree.
The Guardian quoted one person close to the
negotiations as saying: “The Co-op would have
been a better fit for its mutual values. Sainsbury’s
is just a plc trying to do what Tesco has done. It’s an
extreme outcome, Nisa has no need to sell itself.”
That, reportedly, is not the view of the Nisa board.
Chief executive Nick Read has warned members
that Nisa faces a big squeeze between the discount
retailers and the expanding Tesco convenience
empire. Fear of the future is as much the motivation
as the shock of the recent trading losses.
It is worth noting that Nick Read has faced
internal opposition to his radical restructuring
of Nisa. He only arrived at the company in 2015
from Thomas Cook, where he was group customer
service director and would presumably have had
close relations with the Co-operative Group.
The stakes for both the Co-op Group and
Sainsbury’s are high – as indeed they are for Nisa’s
shareholders. In the end, it may be what is on offer
beyond the price that seals the deal.
p Nisa Local at Custom
House, London E16
Image: Flickr/Kake
“”
THE STAKES FOR BOTH THE CO-OP GROUP
AND SAINSBURY’S ARE HIGH – AS INDEED
THEY ARE FOR NISA’S SHAREHOLDERS
JULY 2017 | 47

REVIEWS
150 years and counting…
How a local co-op changed Essex for the better,
as told by the people who’ve known it the longest.
Chelmsford Star:
150 Years and
Counting
By Chelmsford Star
Co-operative Society
(2017)
150 years of a truly local co-op
Chelmsford Star Co-operative has reached a
significant milestone this year – and, as part of
the celebrations, the society has published a
commemorative book, dedicated ‘to all the hard
working colleagues of Chelmsford Star, past,
present and future’.
In 1998 the co-op faced a crossroads in terms of
its future, but instead of going down the merger
route, the board worked to transform the society –
to great effect.
“It is fair to say that the journey has not been
easy,” writes Barry Wood, chief executive,
introducing the book.
“But with the dedication of the directors who
have served the members who elected them, a
committed management team that continue to
have a vision for the society’s future and, most
important of all, our entire workforce, the society
has achieved what many of the sceptics thought
wasn’t possible; to ensure the society continued
to be a successful co-operative society serving its
members in Chelmsford, and around Essex.”
What follows is a collection of personal
anecdotes from colleagues, directors and
managers, accompanied by facts about the society
and brilliant photographs charting the society’s
journey through time.
The co-op owes its existence to Thomas
Chapman, an employee at the London Road Iron
Works in Chelmsford, who met with friends to
discuss ways to improve the lives of their families.
The idea of a local co-op to provide affordable good
quality items, while benefiting its local members,
took form and, helped by Wesleyan preacher
George Young, the ‘The Chelmsford Star Industrial
Society’ was officially formed in April 1867 and
began trading just a month later.
join our journey
be a member
news
We’ve relaunched our membership!
Now our member-owners have more opportunity to
help us plot the future of our independent coverage
of the co-operative movement
thenews.coop/join
48 | JULY 2017

pu Chelmsford Star through the ages
The society has embraced technology throughout
its history, from from the launch of its Funeral
Service in 1936 (which at the time was the only
service to use motorised vehicles rather than
horses and carts), to the trial of self-service in the
1950s. The book includes memories from some of
those at the forefront of technological advances –
including Hugh Garret (employee from 1977, CEO
from 1982-1998), who introduced the Starcard.
This plastic membership card pioneered microchip
technology at a time when retail store cards
were not yet highly sophisticated in terms of the
information they could store. The Starcard could
hold 51 fields of information and won awards for
innovative technology.
Where are the
Unions?
Edited by Sian Lazar
(Zed Books, 2017)
“2011 was a remarkable year for spectacular mass
protest,” writes Sian Lazar introducing Where are
the Unions?.
But, she adds, “one of the most important
similarities between the Latin American uprisings,
the Arab revolutions and the contemporary
European movements of the indignados has
been onlookers’ tendency to underplay the role of
organised labour in their mobilisations and their
aftermath.”
This book is an attempt to address that oversight,
with a collection of essays that for the first time
compares challenges faced by movements in Latin
America, the Arab world and Europe.
Essays cover the labour movements on different
continents, the precarity of identity, and how
traditional unionism is being challenged in different
ways. They also explore the prospects for worker
mobilisation in the aftermath of the uprisings, as
workers, migrants, students and the unemployed
“try to define political and social alternatives to
neoliberalism and austerity”.
Ms Lazar, an anthropologist based at the
University of Cambridge, specialises in trade
unionism in Argentina, and particularly focuses on
citizenship, social movements and anthropology in
Latin America.
“Where are the Unions? is the book that resulted
from the Bread and Freedom conference that Anne
Alexander and I co-organised a few years ago,” she
says. “I am enormously proud of this collection; it
is genuinely interdisciplinary, combines an activist
perspective with academic rigour and addresses a
really important question.”
An important question – but not easily answered.
The role played by organised labour on the three
regions over the last 20 years has been “anything
but simple,” she admits, and “nor was it always
even supportive of change”.
Often organised labour took advantage of protest
situations to strengthen its own position – but at
the same time, new unionist initiatives developed,
often related to student activism.
“It is evident that the struggle against a common
enemy that might be defined very simply as
‘government in favour of the rich’ requires a much
longer time frame than that of a street occupation,
single protest or even a wave of protests,” she says.
“The authors of the chapters in this book are not
disheartened by this realisation, but write precisely
from a longer sense of ongoing struggle.
“This is especially the case for those who are
activists themselves, but is shared also by those
from journalist and academic backgrounds.”
JULY 2017 | 49

DIARY
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT
Robert Herjavec speaks at the WOCCU
conference, 23-26 July; an exhibition on
the Co-op Party launches in Manchester
on 9 September; Dame Pauline Green
discusses the co-op world on 15
September; UKSCS celebrates 50 years on
1-2 September; and Karen Wilkie joins the
News’s Big Debate on 30 June
30 Jun - 1 Jul: Co-operative Congress
See page 7.
WHERE: Unity Works, Wakefield
INFO: www.uk.coop/congress
30 June: Co-op News AGM
Followed by the Big Debate: Caring for the
community in the face of crisis, with
Jane Avery, CASE; Karen Wilkie,
Co-operative Party; and Dr Kathrin
Luddecke, Plunkett Foundation.
WHERE: Unity Works, Wakefield
INFO: www.thenews.coop/agm
1 Jul: International Day of Co-operatives
5 Jul: Parker Memorial Lecture
Midcounties Oxfordshire Co-op Party
event where Labour MP Thangam
Debbonaire asks: What next for the
Labour and Co-operative Parties?
WHERE: Oxford Town Hall, OX1 1BX
INFO: co-opparty@midcounties.coop
8 Jul: Plunkett Foundation AGM
Formal AGM, at 11:30am, followed by high
profile sector speakers and report launch.
WHERE: NVO Conference Centre, All
Saints Street, London N1 9RL
INFO: www.plunkett.co.uk
20 Jul: Co-operative Women’s Voices
The first of a series of free spaces for
all women in co-operatives to meet and
share experiences, with speakers, drinks
and informal networking.
WHERE: Federation, Manchester (6-8pm)
INFO: cooperativewomensvoices.
eventbrite.co.uk
23-26 Jul: Woccu Conference
Global event for the credit union industry,
with keynote speeches from industry
analyst Susan Etlinger from Altimeter
Group, Robert Herjavec, founder and
CEO of Herjavec Group, and Simon
Mainwaring, founder and CEO of We First.
WHERE: Austria Center, Vienna
INFO: www.woccu.org/
1-2 Sep: UKSCS Conference
The UK Society for Co-operative Studies
marks its 50th anniversary with a look at
the concept of ‘common wealth’ and the
ownership, control and management of
‘public’ goods and services.
WHERE: Newcastle Business School
INFO: ukscs.coop
9 Sep-20 Nov: Pioneering the future
The Co-op Party marks its centenary with
this exhibition on its history.
WHERE: People’s History Museum,
Manchester
INFO: events@party.coop
16 Sep: A Co-op Region: Cambridge
Free event celebrating co-ops in the
East of England and the centenary of
the Co-operative Party, with discussions
and lunch. Speakers include former
International Co-operative Alliance
president Dame Pauline Green.
WHERE: Arbury Community Centre,
Campkin Road, Cambridge CB4 2LD
INFO: contact@cooperatives-east.coop
LOOKING AHEAD
13-15 Oct: Co-op Party Annual Conference
(details tbc)
19 Oct: Social Cooperatives International
School 2017 (Naples, Italy)
16 Nov: Practitioners Forum 2017
(Manchester)
14-17 Nov: ICA Global Conference and
General Assembly (Malaysia)
50 | JULY 2017

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