The government’s support for mutuals appears skin-deep
Karin Christiansen
—In the nine months I have been general secretary of the Cooperative party, I have been listening to coalition pronouncements on mutuals with great interest and growing confusion.
At first there seemed to be a will to explore new approaches to business and to public service delivery. All the talk of a ‘big society’ seemed like it might include an attempt to empower citizens, even if mainly through volunteering, and was accompanied by interest in cooperative working and mutual models, and exploring a genuine space between state and private provision.
This has been backed up with a number of pledges, quite a lot of rhetoric and even a little action. To focus on the action, there have been moves from the government to develop credit unions. There was the Nuttall review of employee ownership. And the Cabinet Office set up a mutuals taskforce, and some support and funding has flowed from that.
However, these efforts have been matched by other moves that take us in the opposite direction. The government is missing huge opportunities to explore genuine mutual approaches on the one hand, while driving forward schemes which are not recognised by the mutual and cooperative movement and are not in line with our values and principles.
The continued lack of imagination around the future of the soon-to-be-privatised Royal Mail is concerning, especially with the lack of clarity around the proposed mutualisation of the Post Office network. The absence of transparency around the mutual future of the Cleveland Fire Brigade is disconcerting. When offered opportunities to support financial mutuals through amendments to the financial services bill, the government did not back them.
The concern sharpens when you look at cases like Central Surrey Health – one of the first employee-owned social enterprises to be spun out. This was exactly the kind of service the government told us a ‘big society’ approach to health was all about – empowering employees to manage the services they provide as close to the ground as possible. It was even named as the first recipient of David Cameron’s Big Society Award.
So it is all the more disappointing that Central Surrey Health started losing out on contracts, including to Virgin Care, because the necessary protections were not put in place. This return to business as usual gives support to those who were arguing that the ‘big society’, and now this version of ‘mutualisation’, might just be a cover for the privatisation of public services.
This is backed up by the government’s attempt to expand the definition of what a mutual is. The recent No 10 ‘nudge unit’ spin-off highlights the problem. Supporters claim that this is a new model which will provide a nudge-by-example for other state-run services to follow. But this organisation is a mutual almost in name only. This echoes concerns prompted by the earlier civil service pension spin-off, MyCSP, with only 25 per cent ‘employee ownership’ and no voting rights for members or employees. This is some way from the model we would wish anyone to be nudged towards, never mind an example of dynamic modern mutualism in action. This is particularly worrying for those employees considering moving to this model, who need to have the confidence that they will receive the support required to make such a transition work.
The Conservatives said they wanted to champion a ‘big society’ and, quite rightly, they seemed to look to the mutual and cooperative sector’s nearly 150 years of practice for help. But many fear the government is risking missing the lessons from the movement, with a clear risk that this fudge will undermine the very model it claims to support.
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Karin Christiansen is general secretary of the Cooperative party
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