MUTUAL AID 150 YEARS OF CO-OPERATION IN LINCOLNSHIRE

Book Review

150 Years of Lincolnshire Co-operative by Alan Middleton, Published by Lincolnshire Co-operative Ltd 2011. ISBN No: 978-0-904327-11-3



I love histories of Co-operative Societies although they are of variable quality so I was delighted by my first impression of this book as it is a stunningly produced illustrated history of one hundred and fifty years of retail co-operation in Lincolnshire. Having read it however I see it also contains a very important extended essay, using Lincolnshire as a case study, of the ingredients for successful retail co-operation. Author Alan Middleton and Editor in Chief Ursula Lidbetter deserve credit in producing a book which not only marks a significant milestone but is also an important contribution to the thinking about the future of retail co-operation.



The story, whilst told in relatively few words, sets the formation and development of the society in its social and economic context yet does not avoid the challenges along the way. It is one of continuous development but there is no sense of inevitability about it. It is clear that at key moments the Society could have taken a different road and there are important lessons for the way in which decisions where taken and how those vital relationships between managers and members where fostered and how together they overcome difficulties in maintaining growth and development.



A recurring issue that would not have concerned the pioneers but has been vital to the society’s success – is the importance of good corporate governance. Alan Middleton who served the Society as a director for 40 years, a good part of the society’s history, is a champion of good governance for co-operative societies and through this history he explores its importance as a driver of success.



There is insufficient space in a short review to describe all the twists and turns in this history but what we can see is that from its inception it is a Society that is both fiercely independent and yet deeply embedded in the community it serves. From when the Lincoln Equitable Industrial Co-operative Society was founded in 1861 by Thomas Parker a joiner from Gainsborough and began trading from 1, Napoleon Place Lincoln, when goods where sold only for ready money and after the first quarter they had 74 members and where able to pay out a dividend of nine old pence, the society’s mission was the “domestic, social and intellectual advancement of its members.”



In 1863 the society asked its members, “to have faith in the lovely principle of co-operation and cast your mountain of woe unto the sea.” By 1876 they had established an education committee and having raised £18 from concerts and readings opened a reading room twenty years before Lincoln’s first public library. By 1898 when Peter Kropotkins, Fields, Factories and Workshops was published the society was mentioned in passing for its work in horticulture and in rural areas an issue which commands a couple of chapters in the book and marks its expansion from the City of Lincoln to the wider county.



Today the Society is still deeply committed to its locality not just by sourcing local produce but by also using its property portfolio to drive countywide economic development. In modern times the Society has thanks to that good corporate governance been blessed by outstanding leadership in the form of Keith Darwin, another Gainsborough boy, and Lincoln born Ursula Lidbetter. Between them since 1992 in just 20 years they have thoroughly modernised the Society taking the turnover from £130million to over £270million, tripling the profit to over £20million and enabling a fourfold increase in dividend to £4million.



Mere statistics however undervalue the importance of the Society to the life of the county. In a spirit of Kroptkin’s Mutual Aid the Society established and continues to support Lincolnshire Co-operative Development Agency and the Society has ensured his other work the Conquest of Bread with its own bakery which supplies bread to others as well as its own stores.



So to what do we attribute the society’s success? Alan Middleton offers the following, “The Board of any co-operative society is key to its success or failure. With the introduction of professional management in the 1940’s it became necessary to establish the correct balance between them and the board. It would take many years to get this to the very best level. However, more than anything it is the willingness of the Lincolnshire board to do its job and only its job, and to do it well, that sets it apart from so many boards of societies long gone.” A lesson for consumer co-operators everywhere.



In Fields, Farms and Factories Kropotkin wanted to reunite the brain worker and the manual worker which he felt had been separated by the division of labour. Lincoln shows how workers by hand and brain can be successfully united and I warmly recommend this book not only as a beautiful embellishment to any co-operative coffee table but as an important education tool for how to run a modern retail co-operative society.

Anglia Regional Co-op Back from the Brink!

There was a debate within the Co-operative retail sector about the merits of national versus regional societies. To put it crudely the idea was that to be competitive the movement needed the economies of scale of a national society to compete. The other side of the argument was that our key competitive edge was in being close to our stores, communities and customers and that was more easily achieved in a regional setting.


It is because those ideas have never been resolved and the spate of mergers that have taken place mainly into the Co-operative Group that we have the current patchwork of national and regional co-operative retail coverage today. They have in common however the need to constantly to turn over their assets to ensure they have the kind of offer their members and customers want to use.

A Society that exemplifies these issues and the dramatic changes the movement has had to face over recent years is the Peterborough based Anglia Regional Co-operative Society.

Its roots go back to 1876, when a travelling salesman from the north sold tea from a canvas covered area in Peterborough. To help the widow of a local railwayman he gave five per cent of his takings to the widow, selling 1,400 lbs of tea that night and raising her £12. He also gave out coupons to his customers which they could exchange for gifts. His rival traders argued that this put him in breach of the Lottery Act and, although magistrates sentenced the man to two hours’ detention, his actions inspired the locals.

The very first meeting of the Peterborough Co-operative Society took place in his tent!

That story highlights three issues the movement has always faced, hostility from capitalist traders, the often inadequate legal basis for co-operative business and crucially that if you want to return something to the community you have to make a surplus!

More recently the modern Anglia Regional Society was born of a merger between the Greater Peterborough and Waveney Regional Societies in 1987.

Why the history of this society is so important is because it was central to another key argument over trade should we concentrate on food or non-food? With the formation of the Co-operative Group it took the key decision to pull out of what is called non-food. I am sure many readers have fond memories of Co-operative Department stores selling clothes and furniture. For decades they were the symbol of co-operative retailing. Until very recently Anglia was a champion of this type of retailing with stores as far north as Berwick and as far south as Cinderford.

They were convinced that there was a future in the town centre department store model. There was a perception that if the society could grow sufficiently large there was a point at which this type of retailing could be profitable. Their peak was reached in 2005 when the Society took 9 stores off the Co-op Group to add to the twenty plus it already had.

Sadly customers and member’s tastes changed, out of town retailing for furniture and clothing took hold and the point of profitability disappeared into the distance. You could not say however that they did not try to make the format work.

Then the credit crunch and in austerity Britain there came a point when the debt that the stores where racking up and poor trading where endangering the whole of the Anglia Society. Clearly some radical surgery was needed but everyone in the movement was caught out by the boldness of the Anglia management team’s approach.

With a thousand jobs at risk Anglia came up with an imaginative solution. Whilst keeping the freehold of the stores it has transferred nineteen of the department stores to Beales PLC. Whilst trading under the Beales brand the stores will continue to operate AHF furniture and carpets, Co-operative Travel, Anglia Co-op Optical and Stylistics hair and beauty concessions with Beales being committed to honoring the co-operative dividend.

Then later in 2011 the other part of Anglia’s non-food estate Anglia Home Furnishings (AHF) was transferred to its staff as a going concern. This single transfer made AHF amongst the largest workers co-operative in the country. With nine stores of its own and trading through ten department stores and an online presence this is a business, with a turnover of over £14 million.

All three elements have been freed to concentrate on what they are good at. Beales is good at department stores, AHF has pioneered new store formats that have set it off to a flying start and Anglia has been free to focus its full attention on the core businesses of Food, Funerals and Specialist Retail and most importantly ensuring value for the members. In the first half the Society overall achieved an Operating Profit of £2.65m. This may not seem much but is a huge advance on the loss of £0.2m at the same time last year. During the period the Society has again significantly reduced borrowings and are now opening new stores and growing again.

Whilst these changes may have been forced on Anglia due to changes in the trading environment they have been made sensitively with the minimum impact on employees. Meanwhile the Society has been using the advantages of the electronic membership system to good effect in rewarding customer loyalty. The system also allows members to donate their ‘divi’ to the Anglia Co-operative Community Fund (ACCF). As I write over £700,000 has been awarded to good causes. So from 1876 to today the principles of giving members good value and supporting those in need still holds true!

Co-op's in Higher Education

Like co-operators everywhere I was saddened to hear of the death of Elinor Ostrom. Elinor, or Lin, as she was known was remarkable; the only woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. Her Prize was for her analyses of how individuals and communities can often manage common resources – ranging from activities as far apart as irrigation systems, fisheries and information systems – better than markets or the state.


Her most influential book was the 1990 work, Governing the Commons, in which she examined numerous local management systems overturning the conventional wisdom of resource management. This was the work that lead to her Nobel laureate and Time Magazine, earlier this year, to list her as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people.

I was thinking about her when I attended the Co-operative Education Trust Scotland (CETS) conference, Co-operation and Co-operatives in Higher Education, which bought together teachers, lecturers and students from across Scotland, in the Institute for the Formation of Character, the school founded by Robert Owen, at New Lanark.

Despite the work of great minds like Elinor’s neo-classical economics, has higher education in a death grip. It is like a religion, in the sense that its belief in markets is based purely on faith when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Like many abstract ideas they work very well in theory but not only do they not work in practice they simply do not exist. For neo-classical economists co-operatives are a result of market failure and the thing do when markets fail is to make the market work better with yet more liberalisation and deregulation.

The fact is that markets always fail because they are an abstract idea and take no account of the way people actually behave. The only way they can be made to work in the interests of people is by some degree of co-operation. But today co-operatives have almost completely disappeared from the economic text books.

When the subject of economics had its original name of political-economy co-operatives where well represented in the text books with co-operatives being presented in great detail with important contributions from Robert Owen, Proudhon, John Stuart Mill, Charles Gide and the Webb’s.

Come the rise of the neo-classical thinking however and all this disappeared.

The question we have to ask is why? Is it because co-operatives are less important? If anything co-operatives are more important now than a hundred years ago. In the European Union countries co-operative membership to total population is between 20 and 30 % and in North America it is even higher. By any measure the importance of co-ops globally has increased over the period with more members of co-ops than shareholders in private firms, 1.4 million co-ops international employ over 100 million people 20% more than all the transnational companies put together.

Is it therefore ideological? There is no doubt during this time economics has become even more abstract. That early analysis was of economic institutions today the worlds is bent to match the theory with the role of government reduced to getting out of the way creating perfect spaces for markets to operate in eliminating any need for co-operation.

This is why it is so important to get the study of co-operatives and co-operation back into Universities and Business Schools. The complete failure of the pure market model to reflect the needs of the real world means we have a new co-operative opportunity. But it will be stillborn if students and policy makers have no idea what co-operatives are, how they work and how they can be encouraged.

This ignorance also enables charlatans to fill the space with all sorts of outlandish business models called co-operatives or mutuals when no meaningful control in the enterprise is exorcised by the members in the form of customers, suppliers or workers.

It is for this reason it was great to be in Scotland and to see the excellent work that CETS are doing. They now have three levels of qualification approved by the Scottish Qualifications Authority. Beginning with Co-operative Enterprise the Democratic Alternative, history of the movement, practical activities and an international perspective, this is a huge step in the right direction.

It was also a delight to be at the launch of Democratic Enterprise a fantastic new educational resource. Developed jointly between CETS and the University of Aberdeen it is designed for undergraduate students and provides an open access, introductory-level analysis of democratic models of enterprise, ie co-operatives and employee-owned businesses. A supplement to any course or module that deals with these topics, it also stands alone as a template for academics who wish to incorporate material on democratic models of enterprise into their courses or modules.



This is a completely free resource so any teacher or lecturer can get hold of this material at: www.abdn.ac.uk/cets/resources/democratic-enterprise. So no excuse for university teachers to ignore the topic, Dairmuid McDonnell, who has worked on this for CETS deserves the plaudits but this is just a start of the education and educational tools we need to take co-operatives and co-operation out of their intellectual ghetto.

Celebrating the Co-op Group's Democracy

There is no doubt that the Co-operative Movement like all progressive movements underwent a near death experience during the onslaught of Thatcherism. Today we have a vibrant and exciting sector that to be honest is in a much better shape than we ever thought possible but perhaps not in as good a position as it should be. This was what went through my mind as I sat in the Annual General Meeting of the Co-operative Group in Manchester on a very hot weekend. The Group is the giant of the UK Co-operative sector a collection of significant individual businesses that have grown from a series of amalgamations of smaller consumer retail societies and the shared services the old Co-operative Wholesale Society used to undertake on behalf of the entire consumer co-operative movement. The AGM in Manchester is as you would perhaps expect in society with 7.2 million members a huge example of representative democracy with delegates from all the regions and devolved nations and from affiliated independent societies. Making for hundreds of representatives in a huge co-operative parliament. The Group has a lot to celebrate, with a store in every postal area of the UK we are all familiar with the Co-op food stores but did you know it is Britain’s 3rd largest pharmacy chain, as well as Britain’s biggest farmer and funeral director? Then there is the Banking Group and the travel arm with Thomas Cook. This is a huge business conglomerate when they have to some extent gone out of fashion. With a turnover of £13.3billion and £585million operating profit there is a lot to discus. A large part of the chair, Len Wardle’s, report to the members was taken up with the proposed purchase of banking branches from LloydsTSB. Frankly members have been disgusted with the way this had been reported in the financial press. The attacks on the Co-op Group board members as, a nurse, a Methodist Minister, a civil servant, a farmer, etc and therefore unfit to run a bank drew the response that if more Banks had been managed by people with common sense and real world experiences the country would not be in the mess it is in now! This attack on the democracy of the Group is a fundamental issue. We cannot allow the FSA or our enemies in the City who are against our democratic culture to determine our structure. Better in my opinion to pass over the opportunity for quick growth and stick to slower more organic growth than allow ourselves to be dictated to in this way. There is also a school of thought that in the present crisis in the banking sector it is impossible to do any accurate due diligence on these banking operations. The Group also has some new irons in the fire with the expansion of Co-operative Legal Services widening access to the law with the creation of 3,000 new posts. This is an area where trust is paramount and is a testimony to the integrity of the brand. Members however where not resting on their laurels. Clearly as a community retailer the Groups fortunes rise and fall with the communities they serve. There where key motions on improving the food store proposition and a demand that the Co-op Group supports the Living Wage Campaign. This latter is a tough ask for the Group as competition in the food sector is vicious and a 10p increase in the hourly rate is £50million off the bottom line. Also the competition in the form of Asda-Wallmart, Tesco and others has deep pockets. However the Board where anxious to find ways within the means of the Group to see what could be done and to report back to next half yearly meeting. There were tough questions on, supporting the communities in which we trade, e-business, joining with other European Co-operators in international buying, as well as issues around packaging and waste, and executive remuneration. The board where certainly put through their paces. I think however we are fortunate in the quality of the management team and the excellent quality of the CEO’s of the independent societies on the board. People like Ursula Libetter of Lincolnshire, Martyn Cheadle of Midlands, and Ben Reid of Midcounties stand comparison with any CEO’s in the corporate sector. The AGM had some more pleasant duties like voting through the distributions of £50.8million to the individual members and £24.4million to employees. I must say also I was deeply impressed with the contributions from the delegates from the Group regions, the quality of the arguments put forward, even if you did not agree with them was impressive. The passion for the communities they represent shone through, with rich accents from all parts of the United Kingdom. The democracy and representativeness of the Co-operative Groups Parliament feels and sounds like the real thing unlike some of the noises that emanate from the Palace of Westminster which these days sound like bland waffle in comparison. As I said at the beginning we are in a stronger position than we dared expect but we know we can do better and we will have too if in the present period we are to withstand both the competition and the destructive nature of the government’s economic policies.

In Praise of Champagne Socialism!

I am sure many readers of the Morning Star have been accused of being the proverbial Bollinger Bolshevik because they perhaps have a taste for the very best in food and wine. It is funny how many TV chefs trek half way across Europe to eat the food of peasants. I wonder if it is to escape the processed pap they help the supermarkets to sell to millions of us Brits! The TV advertisers tell us it is traditional or just as good as mother used to make but nothing could be further from the truth. There is no greater pleasure than sharing a meal, of good food and good wine, in good company. The tragedy is that unlike in most other European countries where people are closer to the land because of our early start at industrialisation and the consequent land clearances most Brits have long since lost contact with the place where their food and drink actually comes from. I well remember my first visit to the Fete de Humanite the newspaper of the Communist Party of France. Each region of the Party had a tent with a bar and restaurant selling its own particular regional speciality and the Communist Party’s from other countries had similar stalls. I particularly enjoyed those of Italy, Spain and Portugal. I can still remember the Portuguese stand with its grilled sardines and Douro wine; it makes my mouth water to think of it. One refuge from this blandness and an escape to world of the very best wine at very reasonable prices is to loin the Wine Society. WHICH readers proclaim it to be the very best of wine club voting it head and shoulders above all the others. Last Christmas I bought my wife a share in the Society, she is half Spanish, and is particularly fond of the albarino wines of the Rias Baixas area in North West Spain, which can be hard to come by. I must admit she went a bit mad with her first order delivered in the Society’s own van. “Never mind”, I said, “I will help you to get rid of it”! Unlike other clubs the Society is a genuine co-operative with a rather interesting pedigree. For the last of the Great Exhibitions, in 1874, various countries sent large quantities of wine in cask to be stored in the cellars of the Albert Hall where according to the early history of the society, ‘it entirely escaped notice from visitors’. The Portuguese growers appealed for help, step forward Major-General Henry Scott, one of the architects of the hall who held a series of lunches to publicise the wines. Many guests expressed an interest in buying the wine and Scott proposed the setting up of “a co-operative company” to buy good quality wines and sell on a regular basis to members. The International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Limited was born. This months AGM will be the 138th year the Society has reported to its members. It is still owned solely by them (one share each) and trades exclusively with them and there are a clear majority of elected members, 8 out of 13, on the board. The focus however is the same as it has always been and that is to make available to members the best quality of wine and service at the best possible price. The society sells only to members and a lifetime share costs just £40 with no annual fee or obligation to purchase and what’s more new members get a credit of £10 to their account to help with their first purchase. The Society’s wine buyers cover the world looking for excellence in every price bracket. Prices start as low as £5 a bottle. Whilst of course they carry all the classics from Claret to Burgundy and the Rhone the current range of 1,500 wines enables members to explore less well known wines if I am beginning to sound like their marketing manager it is because the more members the lower the costs! As the society measures success in member satisfaction at the beginning of this year they reduced over 300 prices and there where no price increases. Because they are a co-op they where able to reduce margins and reinvest previous year’s profits back into the society. 2011 was a tough year with a VAT increase, volatile exchange rates and members feeling the pinch and trading down. So despite the highest ever case sales, over 600,000 to 110,000 members, the deliberate reduction in margin meant that gross turnover only slightly increased to £69.2million. They have declared a 2% dividend which is to be retained within the business to continue to improve the service which includes free delivery on cases of twelve bottles. The price and quality of wine from the IWC is second to none and according to the chair Sarah Evans, who spoke at this years co-operative retail conference, this is thanks to its mutual, co-operative, status, “the buyers are not tasked with meeting specific selling prices and profit margins set by commercial priorities, but with finding high quality, interesting, value-for-money wines from around the world at all price levels. Member satisfaction is paramount, maximising profit is not.” They must be doing something right. Despite the fact they do not advertise membership grew last year by 13,269! As I write we have just taken delivery of a case of white sauvignons for summer which I can tell you we will enjoy drinking even if it never stops raining!

UNITY: a 125 Years of Bolton’s Socialist Club

June 2nd sees Bolton Socialists on the moors taking their annual Walt Whitman walk, with fellowship, a swig of wine from the loving cup and poetry from Whitman. An event made famous from Stuart Maconies Radio 4 documentary and the book, With Walt Whitman in Bolton by Paul Salveson. Their association with Whitman is just one in a long list of historic ties going back to their formation in 1887. “The story begins with Tom France, who sold hot peas around the streets.” Argues Denis Pye in his history of the Club, In January 1886, Tom announced in the Social Democratic Federation newspaper, Justice that he would like to hear from any friends interested in forming a branch. The branch grew and was very active in a bitter engineering workers dispute from May until October 1887. In which they where supported by full-time SDF organiser Tom Mann, Bolton Socialists where so impressed they invited him to stay setting him up with a tobacconists and newsagents in Deansgate. Not long after his arrival the Independent Order of Good Templers Hall where they had been meeting became the Social-Democratic Hall, or the Socialist Club. Bolton had an incredibly vibrant socialist scene, as well as a Labour Church, they even tried to establish the Bolton Co-operative Commonwealth a self supporting village or colony. Sadly it only lasted six years. Meanwhile many important figures passed through including Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. In 1892 the ILP was established in the town with a strong overlap with the SDF. Noticeable when in 1896 Eleanor Marx came to speak. But the most important vehicle for creating socialist unity was the Clarion. Not just a political paper but a way of life. Its readers formed choirs, theatre groups, cycling and rambling clubs and most of all preached socialist unity. It is thanks to the Clarion that we still have a Socialist Club in Bolton today. It was in June 1898 that Sarah Reddish, active in the Co-operative Women’s Guild well known as a speaker with the Clarion women’s van, wrote in to the paper as Secretary of Bolton West Ward ILP branch saying they where prepared to fuse with the SDF. That fusion took place in September 1898 to form the Bolton Socialist Party. Their Principles and Objects ring down the years: a) The national ownership and control of land and the means of distributing national wealth. b) The reduction of the hours of labour to the lowest point compatible with the highest material moral and intellectual development and well being of the individual and society. c) The equal right of all to the highest and best education. Equal social rights, duties and responsibilities. Observance of the highest principles of fellowship. d) The abolition of all class privileges and monopolies. The abolition of war and the establishment of peace between nations. e) The furtherance of Socialism to the uttermost:- by means of local conferences, elections, public meetings, papers, pleasures and pastimes, not incompatible with the highest interests if the Party and Club and the uttermost furtherance of its objects. f) The promotion of the highest material wellbeing of the people of this and every other country of the world, without distinction of race, sex or creed. g) The emancipation of labour from the domination of capitalism and landlordism. The establishment of social equality between the sexes, the cultivation in all the clearest of conception and love of truth, justice, liberty, good manners and good motives. In 1901 a prospectus for the Bolton Socialist Hall Limited (the Co-operative Industrial and Provident Society which still exists) was launched offering £1 shares. Meanwhile social, cultural and propaganda activities continued, a Socialist Sunday School was established with the Socialist Ten Commandments which were reproduced for the centenary by Leeds Postcards. The same year James Connolly visited the town and by 1904 they had raised enough money to buy 16, Wood Street. Still committed to unity the Bolton Socialists sent delegates when the SDF called a Unity conference in 1911. This lead to the formation of the British Socialist Party and they became a branch. Then in 1913 they hosted Big Jim Larkin campaigning against the Dublin lockout. In 1916 a pro-war faction of the Socialist Party formed a National Socialist Party; the Bolton branch had the good sense to reject this and became independent once again. Following the war club secretary, Jim Paulden, write a hundred-page epic poem in praise of Lenin, yet at the end of 1921 they affiliated to the Labour Party. Sadly from the late 1920’s for fifty years the Club became something of drinking den as they exploited the licensing laws to serve alcohol when the pubs where shut. Left wingers still met in the Club but it was thanks to the licensing authorities who took the clubs license away in 1979 that it rediscovered its true purpose. In hock to the brewery the club was put up for sale in 1982 but its co-operative status saved it – the signatures of 75% of its members where required to wind up the society and they simply could not be found. The Society was re-floated in November 1983. The reborn co-operative club introduced many of the old activities to a new generation. Sadly in a burst of sectarianism by the Labour Party the clubs affiliations were terminated having hosted a meeting of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party – like they have for many other socialist parties and organisations. Independent again every Friday they have a regular cycle of events designed to encourage the education, organisation and agitation of socialists. They support those in struggle but also have a full cultural program of cinema, talks, play readings they even have a Clarion choir. As William Morris pointed out they are engaged in that most important of work “making socialists”. The Bolton Socialist Party and Club have been doing just that for 125 years, every town needs one!

Civil Service Pensioners Mugged by Maude and Hutton

I read in a Cabinet Office press release "the first 'John Lewis style' business created from a central government service", and ‘the first joint-venture mutual’ said the BBC. What is this new venture? It is MyCSP Ltd -short for My Civil Service Pension. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, hailed it as an alternative to the "binary choice" between state monopoly and privatisation, and as a "pathfinder" at the "cutting edge of public-service reform". The man who created panic over a potential fuel strike is now spreading panic through the Civil Service and its pensioners as he again mangles the language in privatising the Public Service Pension Scheme whilst telling the world he is creating a mutual. There are such things as financial mutuals, they have their own Association, it is a significant group of 57 member owned businesses managing assets of over £85billion. For the record it defines a financial mutual as “an organisation that supplies financial services products, and which is owned by its customers, or members.” Examples include NFU Mutual and Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society. The 1.5 million members of the Civil Service Pension Scheme have no role in the new organisation. So it is a simple test is MyCSP owned by its customer/members? NO! So it is NOT a financial mutual. Is it owned by its employees? The definition published by the Employee Ownership Association says that, “for an organisation to be classified as ‘employee owned’, employees must have ownership of more than 50 per cent of the organisation”. So a stake of half this means MyCSP is not employee owned either. What’s more a key co-operative principle is “voluntary and open membership”. In a survey conducted by the PCS Union of staff in MyCSP over half responded. 96% wanted to retain their civil service status in full and 94% were opposed to the government's view that the mutualisation would ‘empower employees and improve performance’, as Maude had claimed. What is more as the workers have been coerced into this new business it is in no sense a co-operative. So who are the real owners? Well it is to be 40% owned by the Equiniti Group and the Government are to retain a 35% stake which makes it look like another smelly PFI scheme. As a sop the people who work in the company are to get a 25% stake held in trust. But who are the Equiniti Group? The Chairman is, Kevin Beeston, ex Serco and the Chief Executive is, Wayne Story, ex Capita, not exactly famous for a commitment to workers co-operatives or mutuality. The new business is set to get the contract for the Civil Service Pensions for seven years then they will be out to tender for the business against other Pensions administration businesses. The Parliamentary All Party Group on Employee Ownership, produced a report called Sharing Ownership, The role of Employee Ownership in Public Service Delivery. They asked David Burbage, from the London Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, if the mutualisation programme was viewed as “disguised privatisation” which could “swallow up” employee led mutuals. He responded that this was something that would have to be guarded against: “We don’t want to find we’re dealing with Serco in a different kind of deal”. Well that looks to me just what we have here. It is not as if we have not been here before when the Railways where privatised in 1993 the Corporate Pensions Department for the British Railways Board was also privatised as Pensions Management Ltd. Today it is called RPMI Ltd as they changed their name to attract non-railway clients. The scheme has been under continuous criticism from all of the rail unions. Despite a Commission on Railway Pensions the disagreements between workers and the scheme has continued. The current pensions dispute between ASLEF and East Midlands Trains which has led to this month’s strike action shows the importance to workers of their pensions. There is a case for both worker ownership and control and mutual financial services, they could have started for example with the bust Banks they had taken into public ownership, but the case of MyCSP is just Government spin. Just look who is to be the £1000 a day chairman of this new business according to James Lyons in the Daily Mirror who else but the architect of the work longer, pay more, get less, pension for public sector workers, the man who started the pensions assault in the first place, Lord John Hutton. What do the new quarter “owners” of MyCSP get? Well many will get the sack! Interviewed on the Civil Service Live Network the new CEO Phil Bartlett said when asked does the new business model mean staff numbers will fall said: “Yes. Overall when we start out, we’ll probably employ about 700 people in the public and private sectors running this. When we’ve re-tooled and opened up the new channels, then we’ll be smaller than that; probably half the size, maybe a bit less.” How long will it be in its present structure? “We want a mutual shareholding structure that provides good stability over time. But you never say never in these things. It will be the shareholders themselves that will take those decisions to change those arrangements in the future,” he says. Clearly the government could have prevented such a possibility by either making it a real mutual or giving the workers complete control. But they have done neither and this dreadful beast will do terrible damage to the image of employee ownership and the mutual sector by behaving like the private business it is.