Co-operative and Mutual Businesses — House of Commons, 2019-06-27
Topic: Domestic Commerce
David Drew (Labour, Centre-left): It is a great honour to follow the current chair of the Co-operative party, my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley). I am glad that her predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), was able to secure the debate. I am grateful to him for all he did, including taking the party through some quite difficult periods. The movement has also suffered, because of some of the well-known controversies that we had to face down. I thank the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), who is no longer in his place. It is good that there is at least some support from those on the Government Benches for something that some of us, as proud Labour and Co-operative party MPs, feel is very important. We feel that the co-operative message is not always heard as much as it should be, in this place or, more particularly, in wider society I just want to touch on three quick points, but I will just mention what has already been said, which is that we need to see the growth of co-operation. It is an alternative to capitalism and state socialism, and it is important that we see it as an answer to the problems of the 21st century, rather than as purely a historical legacy. I hope the Minister will say some nice things and respond in kind to the suggestions I will make. I am not going to talk about credit unions, but it is important we recognise that they have a part to play in financial arrangements. I was one of those who set up the Stroud co-op union, which is still flourishing. It needs to grow and we need some help to make it grow, but it is an answer for those who find it difficult to access finance in other ways My first substantive point is on what I have always felt is a great problem with co-operation: where to get advice to set up a co-operative. State business support organisations, whether local enterprise partnerships or their previous incarnations, have all suffered from the same problem, which is that the people offering advice have either had no experience at all of co-operation, or their experience has been limited to what they have read about it. Co-operators need to be able to advise other potential co-operators. I hope the Government will consider this issue, because too often this is a huge lacuna. There is no one to go to who knows enough about the opportunities that the co-operative movement as a whole can bring. Since the loss of co-operative development agencies, which many of us have sadly witnessed over the past few decades, this issue has become much more acute Secondly, co-operative housing can be a solution, particularly in rural areas where community land trusts have now come into their own, but we need a number of things to happen to make them more available than they currently are. First, we need changes to the planning system. I am pleased that the Government have now looked at small sites and made them more accessible to this form of provision, but at the moment the planning system is such that too often communities and neighbourhood planning groups who want to have a small clutch of housing either give up because it is too bureaucratic, or they get turned over and it ends up as executive housing in villages, which is just what they did not want. They want affordable units. Dare I say it, they want social units The great benefit of community land trusts is that the land remains held mutually in perpetuity. That is very important, because losing the land means losing control. It would therefore be very helpful if the Government looked at the planning system in that regard and at what financial help they could provide to such groups. It is expensive to go through the rigours of trying to set up a community land trust, so I hope the Government will be generous and consider ways to help such communities solve these problems. They do not want masses of housing; they want 10 to 12 units and they want them to remain affordable in perpetuity. That is why community land trusts, as a form of co-operative housing, are so important My final point is on the role of co-operation in farming. The Agriculture Bill will one day come back to this House, but so much of it is predicated on public moneys for public goods and none of us quite knows how that will work. We are waiting to examine the environmental land management trusts in more detail so we can know how they will work in practice, but the simple fact is that farmers are already co-operators. More than half of all farmers belong to some form of co-operative. They may not always recognise that. They may think that NFU Mutual is a pure insurance company, but it is a mutual. It is a co-operative.