Green Energy For Schools

There's been a fantastic Co-operative Group initiative on the go in recent months which I have been very amiss in ignoring - the Green Energy for Schools project.

The Co-op Group put together a £1m fund that, together with matched funding from Her Majesty's Government, is buying and installing solar panels on the roofs of 100 schools. The panels will come with a display unit showing how many units have been generated - the idea is that they will be as much an educational tool as a producer of renewable energy.

You can cast an eye over the list of schools that have already had them installed - Mayfield Primary School and Castle School in Cambridge are amongst that number, and more panels are being installed all the time. Please note though that no new nominations for the scheme are being accepted - the full quota of one hundred installations has already been snapped up by schools.

Customers Who Care

The Co-operative Bank have released their annual press release revealing how much business they have lost over the last year by sticking to their ethical policy. I would imagine that the true loss of business is much larger - I mean if you were a factory-farming arms trader with links to oppressive regimes, would you even entertain the idea of applying to the Co-op for a bank loan?

Another strand to the Co-operative Bank's ethical bow is the Customers Who Care campaign. This is designed to harness the terrific ethical energy of the Bank's customer base to make a real change. The focus of the next 12 months is the subject of Human Rights - in particular the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Customers of the Co-op Bank are invited to pledge to uphold the declaration, and to take action to help promote human rights around the globe. The Bank will be working with Amnesty International and other human rights charities to really try to make a difference. The campaign fund receives 1.25p per £100 spent on all Co-op Bank credit and debit cards. OK, that's a small percentage, but overall it adds up to a big fighting fund to be spent on the ethical issue of the moment.

May 2008 Area Committee Meeting

Perhaps the most important duty of the Co-operative Group Cambridge and East Anglia Area Committee for the May meeting was to comment on the recommendations of the Group Board concerning the constitutional review. I have already covered this is some depth, so I will very briefly summarise this part of the meeting as being broadly supportive of the proposals, with some concern expressed regarding the mix of lay and professional directors on the CFS board (and to a lesser extent the other subordinate boards). You can watch the presentation of the recommendations to the national Group AGM here.

We also discussed the recent regional AGM held in Kettering. I think that the prevailing view was that it had gone well, with the workshops in the morning being particularly useful.

Our discussion of trading matters concentrated on our food shops in the area, with a local Operations Manager talking to us about overall financial performance so far in 2008, plans to rebrand shops, and a discussion about those shops that are felt to be currently underperforming. The Ops Manager also talked about plastic bags. These have now been banned at our Girton store as part of a village campaign. Our other stores will gradually become a bit more responsible about plastic bags. The idea is that after roll-out, plastic bags will be kept behind the counter rather than in piles out front, and there will be lots of publicity about alternatives (including our Fairtrade unbleached cotton bag of course)!

We then had our update from Ranjit, our Co-operative Affairs Officer, concerning all the membership activities that had gone on. Our "What's in a Name" event had had very god feedback from our members - but sadly it wasn't booked to capacity. The part of the day that had seen a visit to the Daily Bread worker Co-op was particularly well received. Forthcoming events include Strawberry Fair, the Royal Norfolk Show and the Folk Festival.

We then allocated our Community Fund cash to local charities and community projects. We had a huge number of applicants, and we were able to support six of them to a total amount of £3,150. More details on these soon.

Finally, we had reports from the Regional Board and the regional Values and Principles committee. In the minutes of the Board, I noticed that the question that I had suggested for the AGM regarding the Mosquito child deterrent devices had been withdrawn - an answer had been found informally through the membership team (we are assured that the Co-operative Group does *not* have any. Any previous devices that existed have been replaced with our speakers that play classical music. Making an area uncool to loiter in by playing Mozart is, IMHO, fair enough. Using a brain-curdling high pitched noise is not!

Strawberry Fair

The Co-operative Group membership team will once again be present at Strawberry Fair in Cambridge on the 6th of June. We will have our membership trailer in attendance with a range of activities still to be announced.

Strawberry Fair is the biggest free and volunteer-run festival in Britain. I'd always sort of assumed that the Fair had a long, medieval history, so I was surprised to find out that it started in the 1970's by Cambridge University students who didn't like May balls!

I'm actually a Strawberry Fair virgin, so I'm looking forward to helping out on the Co-op's stall. Give me a wave if you see me!

Book Review #4: The Fight for Fordhall Farm

So far in my (very irregular) series of book reviews, all the titles so far have started with the letters co-op.... . This time, the word only appears once or twice in the whole text, but the book overflows with what Co-operation means regardless.

The Fight for Fordhall Farm concerns the trials and tribulations faced by tenant farmers of the eponymous smallholding over the last five years. They've had a fair amount of publicity during this period - I failed to notice the story until last year when I posted about them on this blog - and now that their tenancy with the community as a landlord is secured, they've written a book to tell their story

Ben and Charlotte Hollins grew up on Fordhall farm, a place made famous in the embryonic organic movement by their enlightened, if eccentric, father Arthur. The family was as much a part of the farm as the meadows and the woodland - the land had been tended by Hollins's for generations and the walls echoed to parties of years past when the farm had been a fashionable place for friends of the family to come for entertainment. Unfortunately, they were tenants not owners, and all it would take for their parents and them to be removed from their farm for ever was a mistimed rent payment and an interest in their land by the giant Muller dairy product manufacturer.

With their parents unable to fight for their farm, Ben and Charlotte took up the struggle themselves, managing to change the council's local plan to remove most of their farm from development status. This, combined with months of negotiation with the landlords led to the two of them obtaining a tenancy for themselves, but this was short-term and didn't provide the security that they required to make the sort of investment that the run-down farm needed.

Meanwhile, a fortuitous series of events led to an awareness of their plight amongst a variety of people - and slowly the idea of a community solution of their problem presented itself. The Fordhall Community Land Initiative was launched, and set about starting to raise money to buy the farm. The reason why this blog is concerned with the story, is that the Initiative was set up as an Industrial and Provident Soceity - and so this was, in effect, a Co-operative solution.

It is to the credit of Ben and Charlotte that they impressed their landlords to such a degree that they agreed a sale should they be able to raise £800,000 in a few months. Money was raised by selling shares - at £50 a pop - in the initiative; by receiving donations and asking for loans from individuals and organisations alike. Although the Tridos Bank came up with a £200,000 loan, the most of the rest came from individuals buying one or two shares, or loaning a few pounds interest free for five years - a true example of what can happen when people act in unison for a common cause. The fact that they reached their target is a testament to the farm's inspirational cause, and to the selflessness of the contributors. It was fantastic reading about this very personal story of the writers that had a happy ending thanks to thousands of others.

I actually feel very guilty that, during those last few nerve-wracking weeks in 2006 before the purchase deadline when every £50 counted, I was blisfully unaware of the drama unfurling in Shropshire! The Co-op News pointed my attention towards Fordhall in 2007, and I have now become the proud owner of a few shares. Fordhall continue to welcome new shareholders as further capital is required to help pay off that bank loan, as well as investing in the Farm to help realise its potential as an educational centre.

So Ben and Charlotte are still tenant farmers - but their landlords are a co-operative with interests pretty much coincident with theirs. Everyone concerned wants to give the plucky twosome a chance in the job that they love, and wants to turn Fordhall into an educational centre dedicated to the organic principles pioneered by Arthur Hollins. Ben and Charlotte have a secure 100 year tenancy - and it is no less than they deserve, given their dedication.

I'm not sure how the authors would take to my classification of this book as a must-read for Co-operators. Co-operation is not the star of this book - that status belongs to Arthur Hollins, his farm and its land, and his children who never knew when to give up. But regardless, this book describes co-operation as it should be like - a vehicle to let people band together in a common aim and let dreams come true.

If you want to buy The Fight for Fordhall Farm you can do so on the farm's online shop - which also sells non-intensively produced meat from the farm.

Previous Book Reviews:

1. Co-op - The People's Business
2. Co-operative Principles - Today and Tomorrow
3. Co-operation's Prophet

That Constitutional Review Again

I've found the bit of the Co-op Group website where you can download a copy of the Review document and comment on it. I think that you will need to log in with your membership number and postcode first, but after that, copy and paste this address:

http://www.co-operativemembership.coop/ce/members/yourdemocraticnetwork/constitutionalreview/

The comment board is empty at the moment - so hurry up and you could be the first comment that frames the discussion....

Phone Co-op is Ten Years Old

I was interested to see a flyer in my phone bill this morning for The Phone Co-op's tenth anniversery party. To celebrate ten years of co-operatively provided telecom services (first to charities and social enterprises - then to individuals as well), they're holding a do at Chipping Norton Lido (a community-owned social enterprise) for their members with swimming, food and music. Sadly, I'm unable to go - bizarrely because of an international croquet commitment - which is a real shame.

You know, my parents have been customers of BT since 1981, and NOT ONCE have they been invited to a party of any kind! Just goes to show how special Co-operatives are...

Constitutional Review - the Board's Recommendations

The constitutional review of the Co-operative Group has moved into its final stages with the publication of the Board's recommendations for the new structures that will govern the Society. They've also published an indicative timetable showing how quick we will be able to get these structures up and running should the recommendations meet with the approval of two Special General Meetings. These are more or less the final offerings, with previous consultations with regional boards, area committees and corporate members (i.e. other, more locally based, co-ops) already taken into account. The likelihood is that these recommendations will therefore be accepted - although if they aren't to the membership's liking, then things will obviously have to be rethought.

Unfortunately, things have to move rather quickly if we are to get the new rules in place anytime soon, and this has led to the Cambridge and East Anglia area committee receiving their copies of the recommendations four days before they needed to give their response to the regional board - so there hasn't been any time for the wider membership to have their say on these specific ideas. That said,there was a wide consultation open to individual members earlier in the process.

In brief, my view of the recommendations is that not much will change between the current Co-oerative Group structure and the new one (although I'm sure that there are those that will disagree with that analysis). The three tiers of formal member democracy will continue, with area committees electing regional boards and the group board. This means that, with some slight changes, the Group's representative democracy will continue, and ideas such as direct election of the Group Board have not been implemented.

The regions will change - the new Group will have 7 regions. The flak from Wales and the South West about being combined was too much, which means that the South West have been partnered with parts of the (marginally preferable for them) West Midlands, with Wales standing alone as a region in its own right. The Central and Eastern region, which contains Cambridge and East Anglia, has got marginally larger taking in more to the North. Regional boards will be given an "enhanced role with delegated powers from the Group Board".

General meetings of the whole Society will continue to be attended by regional delegations - rather than by any interested member - but provision has been made for individual member delegates elected by the members in an area or region. This is a great idea, and contributes towards my aim of having steps for members to get involved that lie between the wider membership and elected office. There may also be multiple members meetings in each region prior to the national General meeting that individual members could use to raise local or national matters, which if supported could be considered at the General meeting.

Underneath the regions, there would be around 50-60 area committees, which is slightly higher than pre-merger (when there was around 45 I think). There will be consideration given to informal member networks that operate at a lower level than area committees - perhaps even at the level of the store, as I talked about quite a while ago.
After a bit of hoo-hah - quite rightly in my opinion - about the proposal to remove the responsibility of the area to keep an eye on the trading performance of stores in its area this has been reinstated. In fact, the roles and responsibilities of the new "local committees" (they might not end up with that exact name) are almost identical to those of the current "area committees" - just in a different order! We used to have a rule that area committee members should have at least £25 in their share account to stand for election - but the days when the size of your share account was a good indication of your commitment to the Society are long gone, so there'll be a purchase qualification instead. There is a commitment that this will not be so high that it discriminates against those on low incomes, and purchases with any of the Group's businesses will apply.

Thank goodness, all "economically active" members (i.e. those that use their cards when they go shopping, or who do banking or buy insurance from us etc.) will automatically get ballot papers for area committee members - so we will hopefully see a much higher turnout than when only self-selected members of the "members' network" were sent them. Hooray!

Northern Ireland will be given a different structure to other parts of the UK - this is because they are too small to be a region on their own, but just having an area committee wouldn't do justice to their identity, nor would it be politic with respect to interaction with the devolved administration in the province.

The Group board will be reduced in size from its pre-merger size of 28 (and its entirely unmanageable size of something like 33) to a comparatively petite 20 - this is made up of 15 elected from Group regions and 5 from Corporate members (this reflects the approximate 75%-25% split in trade between them). However, the idea is then to have three subordinate boards - one for Food Retail, one for CFS (Co-op Bank, CIS and Smile) and one for everything else. Each of these would have members from the Group Board, Executives (i.e. the management of the Co-op), and Independent Professional Non-Executive directors to provide a bit of independent, experienced thought. I think that this is quite a neat solution, but was worried that the CFS board didn't have enough democratically elected members on it - we'll have to see if this is altered before the SGMs.

I've been quite clear about my opposition to the age rule in the past. I'm pleased to see that it won't play any part in the new constitution of the Society. The traditional alternative to the age rule is some sort of term limit in order to ensure some sort of turnover on the body concerned. However, contrary to my expectations, this hasn't been imposed on local committees or regional boards - only Group Board members will be subject to a term limit.

Finally, and very importantly, the need to protect the Society's status as a Co-operative was discussed - in other words, how to stop the carpet-baggers coming in and nicking our assets like they did to the Building Societies in the 1990s. The conclusion that the review board reached was that demutualisation basically doesn't happen unless the executive and/or the board are keen on the idea - so the rules will be drafted with the intention of keeping these sorts of characters out of the corridors of power.

Email Disabled

Hi, just a quick note to say that the cambridgeco-operator@hotmail.co.uk address has been removed from the sidebar, and I will no longer be receiving emails sent to it. In actual fact, I have been unable to access email there for a little while, primarily because spammers seem to be using it as the replyto address for their dubious communications. Communication with me is now solely through the comments boxes, I'm afraid. However, if you don't want your message to be public just say so and I can oblige - I have to pre-moderate all comments anyway.

Cheers all,

Sam

Which Came First?

Controversy is being stoked by the Manchester Evening News blog about the birth of the Co-operative Movement. Despite the popular conciousness settling on the Rochdale Pioneers (or was it Robert Owen?) as the first Co-op, the Scots are pointing out that the Fenwick Weavers' Society predated all other examples.

Well, let me first say that no-one with much knowledge of the Co-operative Movement claims Rochdale in 1844 as the first Co-op. There was a whole movement in the 1830s inspired by William King for a start, although it collapsed almost as quickly as it begun. What is special about Rochdale is that they came up with a recipe of doing business and of operating the Society that was not only successful, but spectacularly so. The Co-operative Group of today is the direct descendent of the Rochdale Pioneers, and is rightfully proud of that history.

However, I do wonder if the Fenwick Weavers were really a "Co-op" in the same way as people came to understand that term by the 19th Century. They were a sort of trade association that did a bit of collective buying on the side. What we can be sure of is that they form one strand of the history of the wider mutual movement - a history of which even the Rochdale Pioneers, as well-known and well-celebrated as they are - are equally just one part of.

UPDATE: Oops, I've just noticed that Martin over at Politics for People has already covered this topic - and rather more thourougly than myself. Ho Hum.

Only 12 Weeks Until the Folk Festival!

Tickets went on sale this morning for the 2008 Cambridge Folk Festival. The Co-operative Group has sponsored the Creche for the last few years, and had a large presence from our membership team to try to raise awareness of Co-operative values and principles amongst the festival goers (although a large proportion are already very aware of what we stand for). This year promises to be more Co-operative than ever, with a couple of food retail units providing hungry and thirsty campers with ethical Co-op fare.

Each year we have a theme to our membership activity. Last year we were raising awareness of what we can do - both as individuals and as Co-operators - to help prevent catastrophic climate change with our Show Some Love campaign. This year we will be focusing on our BUAV approved cosmetic and houshold product ranges, and encouraging festival-goers to bear animal welfare in mind when purchasing these sorts of items.

Although I'm not going to be part of the Co-op team at the festival, I will be a paying customer instead due to a lengthy bit of queuing this morning. If you haven't got your tickets yet, your only hope is the phone lines, as the online and in-person tickets are sold out.

As ever, I'm looking forward greatly to the festival - it's a fantastic celebration of great music, good beer and nice people. If you want to say hello, mine will be the tent with "Just Married" written on it - Kate and I will be in the middle of our honeymoon at the time.

Picture above is of the 2006 Folk Festival during the balmy weather that we were treated to. I'm the one with the accordion....

Central and Eastern Members' Regional AGM

Members of the Co-operative Group get two opportunities a year to attend meetings, make their views known, talk to their representatives, and enjoy a light meal. Saturday was one of those occasions - the AGM of the Central and Eastern Region in Kettering.

A bus was laid on from Cambridge train station for those of us from the East of the region. After a quick cup of coffee and chinwag with other members, we split into small groups devoted to two of four choices - Food Retail, Finance, Travel and Pharmacy. After talking to my long-suffering fiancee, she agreed to cover the latter two while I attended the former.

The Food Retail session consisted of a presentation on the ever-growing Truly Irresistable range (which also mentioned the Grown By Us project), followed by the familiar question and answer endurance test for Peter Rowley - our Regional Chief Officer. The idea was to have this session before the formal business in the afternoon so that everyone could exhaust their comments on availability of piccalilli at particular Co-ops by the time that the main meeting was reached, and this seemed to work pretty well. Peter was as impressive as ever in his local knowledge of his store estate, and his ability to field a remarkable array of questions and requests in quick succession.

The finance session focused on a new initiative that is to be trialled in Nottingham in the coming months, in which a selection of food shops will contain resources for shoppers to do banking while at their local Co-op. The degree of provision will vary - some stores will have an ATM, an automated deposit machine and a leaflet rack, while some will actually have a member of the Co-op Bank's staff present throughout the day. The success of the different strands of the trial will then be examined, and if possible rolled out to a much larger proportion of food shops around the country. At the end of the presentation there were plenty of questions about this scheme in particular, and the wider topics of CFS in general.

The formal business in the afternoon followed soon enough, and this was the portion of the day that was webcast live to the whole of the worldwide interwebnet. As if to prove that this webcast was a success, a couple of the questions asked at the meeting came from over the ether in cyberspace - although maybe it was just somebody on the platform pretending to read from a laptop..... Outside of the meeting I did mention to our regional chair the comments made by MJR concerning the limiting format of the webcast which made using open-source software impossible. Hopefully we can raise a bit of awareness about the problem with the people who can do something about it.

The first part of the afternoon was given over to a presentation by the head of The Co-operative Estates about the proposed Eco-Town on Co-operative Group owned land near Leicester. I know that the whole thing is very controversial indeed, but I must say that a heck of a lot of thought has gone into it, and it has the potential to be something very impressive indeed. Having said that, only the broad outline of plans have so far been finalised - it will be interesting to see what emerges to be the final proposal.

Next we had Steve Watts (a member of both the local Area Committee and the main Group Board) giving us the National Overview of the Co-op's financial performance in 2007. I've already gone over this subject in some depth, so I'll say no more, except to note that the Somerfield deal was briefly mentioned. As you might expect, there was no concrete news of real significance, but it was still noteworthy that the topic was mentioned in some detail. In response to a question from the floor, Steve indicated that he thought that should the deal go through, there would be something of a time-lag between acquisition of Somerfield stores and their conversion to the Co-op brand. Having just spent a small fortune for the company, the last thing that the Society should do is change them immediately and radically - with the potential for substantial customer perturbation!

Next up was the report of our regional performance in our Food Retail business, given by the aforementioned Peter Rowley. Once again Peter was able to show off a bit, pointing out that like-for-like sales in the region are up 5.7% compared to 4.8% for the Co-op Group nationally and 3.6% for other retailers. This is a great result, and is a testament to the hard work of all our employees in the region.

I daresay that not many large businesses have a Values and Principles report as part of their AGM - one of the great things about the Co-op is that we do! This focused on the progress that we have made over the past year with regard to our social goals - and when that's presented in front of you, it does add up to a huge effort. A lot of attention was paid to the newly instigated Food Retail Ethical Policy, and the move to make all Co-op own-brand hot beverages (including tea, coffee, hot chocolate - the lot!) Fairtrade. But also announced was the intention to hold member consultation on our community and campaign priorities from 2009 onwards.

Finally, we had a short presentation on the outcome of the Constitutional Review Board on the subject of our governance structures. This was also the subject of a booklet sent out to elected members at the weekend - and which will be covered here soon.

And with that our regional chairman, Herbert Daybell, sent us back onto the coaches. The meeting - a fascinating combination of formal AGM, gossip session, workshop and a free lunch - was over for another year.

Pictured is the auditorium for the formal business part of the meeting where Steve Watts is going over the current situation with regards to the possible Somerfield Purchase