Ethical Policy

Earlier this month, the Co-operative Group published the report on the recent member questionaire on ethical issues, which will become the new ethical policy. The launch of the new ethical policy, complete with a link to an explanatory booklet can be found on the Group's website here.

Over 100,000 responses were returned, which is a pretty good effort from the membership. Inevitably, given the uncontroversial nature of much of the questionaire (which I commented on back in September), most of the interest in the results is contained in the question "What do you consider to be the most important ethical or environmental issue". 27% focussed on ethical issues surrounding our supply train, including fairtrade (14%) and other sound sourcing policies (13%). A quarter of respondents thought that animal welfare should be primarily in the spotlight. 22% focussed on the environment, including 10% on "general environment impact", 8% on packaging and waste and 4% on climate change. The remainder of the votes went to food quality, food and diet, local sourcing and other concerns.

I was surprised by the low vote given to climate change, although perhaps this is an indication that our members want a more rounded concern for our environmental impact rather than just the issue with the most media coverage at the moment. I am sure that when choosing activities of the Society in future, both officers and elected members will bear all these results in mind.

On the less controversial questions on the survey, agreement levels were all over 90%, with the least supported proposal being to continue to exclude fur from all products. 1% of members managed to disagree with the notion of the Co-op ensuring that own-brand products carry clear and honest labelling!

What is important is that our perforamance against our new ethical policy will be measured in next year's Sustainability Report. Some recent examples of our ethical initiatives are talked about here.

While last time I was a little cynical about the questionnaire process, I must say that it is good to get formal member approval for this sort of thing. We now have a clear mandate behind us from a much larger number of members than is normally possible through our federal model of democracy. There are around 500 area committee members in the Co-op Group - 200 times as many people have now had their say. Well done the Co-op!