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.