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