Co-operative and Mutual Businesses — House of Commons, 2019-06-27
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Gareth Craig Snell (Labour, Centre-left): I agree entirely. The hon. Gentleman, as always, has touched on a pragmatic and simple way of fixing something that should not be a problem to start with. He talked about the Staffordshire Credit Union. The reason the Staffordshire Credit Union ended up folding was that we were unable to meet the Prudential Regulation Authority’s 3% threshold rule between capital and assets. With a very small investment that a body like NEST could have provided, we would have been able to continue helping the thousands of people who were members, offering secure, low-return financial products to people who need it the most—people in communities such as Stoke-on-Trent, where payday lenders prey because they know that people want to borrow money quickly. While credit unions do not provide an immediate alternative to payday lending, they are part of the mix that is available. I can immediately think of a number of organisations that would benefit from the sort of investment the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and then the mutual role of NEST would get to grow and become even greater I want to go back briefly to my point about railways and buses. I may end up falling out with my Front-Bench colleagues on this issue, as on many others. State ownership is still a monopoly, and if we are talking about ways in which we could open up public services to be democratically controlled by the public, we need to mutualise them. We should allow and facilitate worker and management buy-outs of existing companies that are looking to be sold, and enable places to allow municipal bus companies to come back into the mix. This would help to sustain the market and—again, I go back to this point—make sure that people using those services have some semblance of taking control of those services and delivering them in a way they think is appropriate for their communities and sustainable in the long term This goes not just for public services. We have not touched on the potential economic benefits of things such as fan-owned football clubs and how we should do more to push fan-owned stadiums. In many other countries, it is not uncommon for sporting facilities and sports clubs to be owned, operated and managed by the users of those facilities. In this country, we have not particularly got into that model, as far as I can see, with the depth and the courage that others have Finally—I am conscious of the time—about 18 months ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) ran a very clever social media campaign pointing out that if the 5% profit of some of the largest companies in the country was shared among their employee base, each employee would receive a certain amount of money, emulating the French profit-sharing law. To turn full circle back to my first point, if we had such a law in this country—it is not necessarily a co-operative solution, but it is about profit sharing and sharing the values of co-operation—what would happen to that money? Most people who work in such companies and small-scale industries will spend that money locally: more money in their pockets means more money going into their local high streets, shops and facilities. I am sure the Government have already looked at the circular effect of an economic benefit coming from a co-operative solution, even if it is not a co-operative model, and if they have not already committed to looking at the French profit-sharing law, I would encourage the Minister to do so It would be wrong of me not to talk about the Co-operative Group as a whole. As has been mentioned by a number of my colleagues, it is not just about the financial products and services it offers, but the values and ethics it brings to them. The Co-operative Group is leading the way on dealing with modern slavery, food injustice and food hunger, and retail crime. It knows that, at the heart of everything it does, is its staff and its consumers, and those are the values that I am sure the Minister will have heard about in every contribution today and will want to make part of any Government strategy on co-operatives.