 Dwi'n gweithio i'r gael, a gwneud hynny'n gweithio fath o'r 9.30 oes yna, o'r ddweud o'r Cwp Cwnggras. Felly, mor hwnnw i ddau i ddau i'w cyhoedd a'r cyfan o'r cyfan. A'n ddigonio'n ddweud o'n ddweud. Fy enw'r cyfan, yr ydych chi'n gweithio'n gweithio'r barhau i gael. Byddwn yn fawr'r cyfloshol, felly mae'n fawr yw'n fawr. We had a tidy eleven. A shoes solve of a lot not so well done everybody were getting up. I'm and it's brilliant because everybody was talking and creating ideas and telling me about all the deals that they've been doing between other co-operatives. There's absolutely loads going on today, a quick little bit of housekeeping. We're not expecting a fire alarm. Thank you for not evacuating the building yesterday. For those of you that are here in y new today, the smoking area is obviously I'r llymau o'r llymau sy'n meddwl hynny. Mae hi'n gweithio gael gwych oherwydd a ydych chi i gyd yn gallu ar holl yn gweithio ar gweithio'r llymau ac yn ystafell o'r llymau sydd ei ddweud ein gwneud hynny. Rwy'n meddwl i'n cyffredin iawn i'r program yma dyma, a roeddwn i'r pernod Tracey Graebin, y maes yng Nghymru i ymddir, y maes yng Nghymru i ymdill, i ddisgu'r regio, Mae'r cyfnodd iawn i'r cyfnodd iawn, mae'n cychwyn ffordd. Ond mae'n ddweud, y 11 o'n clwr ar draws, rwy'n cael ei gweithio yn un o'r ddweud o John Robb a Andy Burnham, a mae'n ddweud yn fawr o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud. Rwy'n cael ei ddoch chi'n gwneud o'r cyfnodd iawn o'r panell ar hyn o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen o'r angen o'r dr George MacGavin here with us today and last night as well so if you can again please do make noise hashtag co-op congress please do send links if you know people that are interested in the challenges around climate change and what they can do to help please point them to the fact if you go to co-ops UK congress now it's just a button that says listen live so please text people and let them know yesterday we had as many people online as we did in the room so it's really fantastic. Okay so absolutely delighted this morning to welcome to open up data of co-op congress councillor Ian Ward who is the leader of Birmingham city council thank you. Thank you very much and good morning ladies and gentlemen it's a huge pleasure to welcome you all to Birmingham and I want to congratulate you on your excellent timing because 2022 is a very special year for this very special city. In just 40 days time the eyes of the world will be on this city as we stage while I'm confident will be an unforgettable commonwealth games and the games are just one of the many reasons why I've labelled this a golden decade of opportunity for the people and communities of Birmingham. This is our time to shine and we're grabbing the opportunity with both hands showcasing our dynamic creative and inventive city. This is also a city of fantastic grassroots organisations a city of collaboration and rich community capital and a city with a proud cooperative and mutual heritage stretching right back to the formation of the world's first building society at the golden cross inn at Aston in 1775. Two years ago Birmingham city council became the 75th member of the cooperative council's innovation network giving us an excellent opportunity to learn from best practice from across the country and last month's council elections saw 14 labour and co-op councillors elected in Birmingham that's over 20% of the ruling labour group. Four of those members Bridget Jones, John Cotton, Karen McCarthy and Jane Francis are cabinet members so this movement has members in positions of influence in Birmingham but more importantly there's the thriving grassroots cooperative movement with organisations like Birmingham friends of the earth, Birmingham students housing co-op, Bournville works housing society and Just Film co-op. The acting wellbeing service is a community benefit society in cooperative that has worked closely with the council particularly through the COVID pandemic to develop healthy happy communities living active and connective lives and if you want to understand the true potential of this movement look no further than the exciting sturchly cooperative development which will provide mixed use premises for two worker co-ops a community co-op and cooperative housing in a new building on sturchly high street. I'm sure many of you know there's already a rich cooperative tradition sturchly with the Birmingham bike foundry art fact gallery and cafe and loaf a cooperative run bakery and cookery school these fantastic organisations are joining forces to create an affordable and eco-friendly residential and retail premises in the heart of sturchly this exciting development could lead the way to other initiatives in Birmingham and it's vital that the council understands and supports the true potential of people who simply roll up their sleeves and get on with it in communities right across the city because as we've seen throughout the COVID pandemic we're our strongest when large anchor organisations like the council work in close collaboration with charities community organisations and other partners we've seen the very best of Birmingham over the last few years and I've never been prouder of this city the contribution from community and voluntary groups from ordinary bromeys working alongside the council and its many partners has been nothing short of outstanding as together we've supported our most vulnerable citizens now that team Birmingham approach and the community spirit we've seen in every neighbourhood and community is needed more than ever if we're going to tackle the long-standing issues that have held far too many people back in Birmingham and as we all know we do face big challenges this is a city of haves and have nots a city of health and social inequality and a city where 42% of children live in relative poverty the sad truth is that boom or bust far too many people in communities across this city do not feel they have a stake in Birmingham's economy and it's not enough to simply patch up a system that's been finding far too many people across the city for many years we must take a different approach that's why i'm proud of the council's community wealth building work with the birmingham anchor network established in january 2020 following an 18 month project led by clare's and funded by the barrow cabbary trust to understand the role anchor institutions play in the birmingham economy the anchor network works to support the six participating organisations to maximise the benefit they bring to the birmingham economy both individually and collectively with combined budgets of approximately five billion pounds and a workforce of over 50 000 these anchor institutions are major economic agents and by collaborating on working key areas of procurement employment and management of land and assets we have the potential to play a powerful role in shaping the city economy so why is this relevant to cooperatives in birmingham well a key way in which network members can support cooperatives in the city is with an ever greater focus on local procurement of goods and services to retain wealth locally to that end we have designed a small contracts procurement hub which will increase the number of small public sector works contracts being won by birmingham based sms and social enterprises and we've conducted an audit of small contract opportunities those that are less than 25 000 pounds identified likely sectors for increased local spend and we've now produced a list of 40 birmingham based social enterprises to match those sectors our challenge as we go forward is to build on the work of the birmingham anchor network over the last two and a half years so we're now committed to increasing our collective local spend to ensure that birmingham based sms social enterprises and of course cooperatives can benefit i'm also interested to hear of other ways that we can and should work with cooperatives and other grassroots organisations particularly in our approach to the next big challenge facing the people of birmingham the cost of living crisis because just as we work with the likes of the active well-being society throughout the pandemic we're now looking to work with community partners across the city to support the growing number of birmingham households who are struggling to make ends meet we all know that this will be a huge challenge but it's one that we must collectively rise to and with a proud history of supporting communities particularly on issues like food justice and community energy i'm sure cooperatives across birmingham have a part to play as more and more people in neighbourhoods right across the city reach crisis point so please talk to us share your ideas and let's work together to support our friends and neighbours in this fast developing crisis now i understand that you had a productive and enjoyable day here yesterday and i trust that today's sessions will be just as well received for those of you are not from birmingham i also hope you've taken the opportunity to see what this great city has to offer and i would urge as many of you as possible to return later this summer when birmingham will be at its welcoming best as we host the 22nd edition of the commonwealth games thank you all very much and good luck for today thank you so much i and so much going on it's very exciting as we talked about yesterday one of the key aims of our strategy is to talk to communities in the way that they understand and really tap into the issues of the day no better example this morning than community shares offer so i'm going to welcome to the stage to explain a little bit more john darson from cooperatives uk thanks rose we're just going to do a quick community shares takeover this morning i'm going to see if it moves to the next slide there we are so i've heard quite a few people talk about community shares as the best kept secrets and for us community shares is a user friendly term that we use to talk about the more technical aspects of withdrawable non transferable share capsule which is perhaps why you can see we talk about community shares instead but we know that it's a very stable and resilient business model our research has found that over 92 percent of businesses who've used community shares are still trading and since 2012 over 200 million pounds has been raised through community shares and that's by people over 128 000 investors and what we really love about that is that it's individuals backing projects that they care about in their communities and these are projects that they're either going to use or trade with things that they can physically see and it's a unique way of getting capital patient capital and directly from people in their communities into projects they care about we also provide the community shares standard mark which is an external assessment of a share offer document and as an unregulated financial product this is a good way of maintaining standards within the sector and we're really pleased that 228 standard marks have been awarded to date and that there's been really strong take up of the community shares standard mark the booster fund itself in england we've been very lucky to have been able to invest over 3.2 million pounds now and that's in 56 investments so this is our way of providing development grants and matched equity support to community share offers and it has helped to catalyse and grow the community shares market in england our 3.2 million has helped leverage an additional 9.5 million pounds and that's from communities putting their own money into projects that they can see and that they love so we've invested alongside those investors on the same terms and these are community share offers all across england and you can see there that the types of projects we're investing in we're trying to invest in projects and in communities that are less affluent and that need that little bit of a boost to give the community the confidence that their share offer is going to succeed and take off so i'm just going to talk to you about two examples before i hand over to mark that we've worked with um the slide to keep jumping forward i'm not sure why that is but in grimsby each mouth east marsh united we've provided them with support um to help them with their share offer and this is one of the least affluent areas of the country and the people there just became sick and tired of the quality of housing and they've taken it upon themselves to organise and to create a share offer to raise capital to buy the houses to refurbish them and to let them uh to local people um and to manage them themselves their share offer has a few more days left to run they're currently at about 375 000 they're looking to raise over 400 000 pounds and that will enable them to buy a number of houses and refurbish them and then another one is down in bristill stokescroff land trust who are concerned about gentrification of share offers and they closed recently and raised 328 000 and that was from 207 investors and by doing that they were able to keep this community building that they loved and cherished in community ownership i'm not quite sure what's happening there sorry uh they were able to keep that in community ownership and we've invested alongside both of those organisations alongside the community to make sure that those projects are sustainable to give them the boost that they need so we're really pleased to do that the good news is we are just negotiating more equity to continue it to invest so we will be able to keep doing this and it's something we want to continue to grow as well to enable more community share offers from different communities across the country and hopefully beyond england as well but now i'm going to hand you over to mark this is one of the latest share offers um you've got this on your table as well but i'll hand you over to mark he's going to give you a quick run through uh about the owner venue share offer and if you want to find out a bit more we're both speaking with Dave Boyle and Eva from Repowering London at 11 o'clock on the community shares session as well thanks um normally when I do one of these and I'm doing an awful lot of them at the moment I have to explain what a community benefit society is why people might invest their own money I feel like you already know that so I'm going to abandon all that stuff and John's just done a great simple explanation there um what I do want to talk about though is um why why in our particular sector which is the music industry how have we ended up thinking that we need to take ownership of our buildings what's the driver of that so just quickly I don't know if you all saw the music panel yesterday or I know some of you did um but basically we're here they gave me a head mic so I could dance around to interpretive dance for you earlier in the morning this whole sector here the bottom of the pyramid that is the live music industry is a vast array of different grassroots music venues grassroots music pubs they are largely whether they know it or not not for profit entities when we started doing this work only 3% of them were registered as a not for profit entity the rest of them were limited companies or sole traders but these days we've managed to raise that to 26% we have the goal of moving that towards 60 or 70% in the next 10 years why is that because their job is to put on music that nobody likes yet that's when they're doing their job really really well when nobody wants to buy any tickets and nobody wants to be there because they don't know who the band is as soon as a band does start selling tickets they move up to the console hall circuit where money actually is being made so our our role is really the foundation of the whole industry and we don't just do it for the live industry if you can name any any artist for the last 60 years Glastonburyness next weekend Paul McCartney's headlining the cabin club Ed Sheeran played 366 shows at this bottom level and the stunning thing about that is of those 366 shows that he played in the last 20 years 150 of those venues are closed down that's how bad our problem is if I can make the slide work why does that matter because music venues this type of music venues sit at the middle of a grassroots ecosystem that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in in each of our communities the existence of a music venue means that you've got all these other services around it the real ignition engines of activity for the music industry but also for communities I call this the kebab question in fact we finished here late so late last night I didn't even manage to go and get a kebab they closed down I've eaten a lot of kebabs as you can probably tell have I ever left my house 1130 to go and buy a kebab no that's never happened why do I buy a kebab because I come out of the concert hall I'm hungry and I go and buy a kebab how do you support the kebab shop owners of the UK open more music venues because people will leave their house and they will go and do something they will take transport there they will go to a pub or a bar beforehand they will go to a nightclub afterwards but you need to give them a reason to be active in the night time economy so what's our problem 35% of GMBs have closed in the last 20 years this is the big one for this room 93% of grassroots music venues in this country are tenants and the average amount of time they've got left on the lease is 18 months so we we represent music venue trust our charity represents nearly 950 of these venues almost all of them are effectively at a risk of closing down within the next 18 months because the landlord will change the tenancy agreement even if they can carry on they'll be on a new tenancy agreement where they can be booted out really really quickly you can read on the screen I don't need to do all that I'm going to tell you the real real challenge here is who owns these properties who owns the freehold what do they want their commercial landlords or investment companies they want to make money what do they really want in a tenant they want a very quiet tenant who's got lots of money and can pay it to them what's a music venue I've just told you they're not for profit entities and what do they do they make a lot of noise so we have an absolute clash between the commercial landlords what they want and what the music venue wants to do there are some solutions to it we've supported some people to buy their own properties that's difficult because then you'd get into the thing of a personality a lot of these venues are driven by one person that person doesn't want to do it anymore they'll sell the same as the commercial landlord will sell we've supported some Lenny Watson was here yesterday from sister midnight I hope some of you got to talk to her they're trying to open one in Lewisham they're using the community benefit society model to do that what we've done is to look at this in a macro style and the reason we've done that is because we're not convinced and John mentioned about how the great work you're doing supporting areas of deprivation relative deprivation giving them support to take control of their assets and their communities what we've done is to look at our problem and say okay we have two communities we have the local community who really wants their music venue to be there and we have the whole of our music industry and every music fan in the country who understands that without these venues we won't have any more Adele's or Ed Sheeran's or Dewa Leeper's all artists that started their careers in these places so we decided to create music venue properties we've got a lot of literature on the table for you anybody can come and find me afterwards we've set up a charitable community benefit society we're raising money for the community shares model we're looking to raise in the pilot project we're doing we're going to buy nine venues place them into this permanent state of charitable ownership create a new type of lease and that lease will be hinged on the one key factor that these venues must provide music to their communities and they must provide opportunities for new and emerging artists to perform music that nobody likes yet we've got nine properties in it 3.5 million it's live now you can go to music venue properties please go to music venue properties i would love to have viewers our investors i want everybody to invest in that i want everybody to have a sense of ownership of the music in their community have it in a protected status so we got their phone out and gone to the link yet i'm just checking whether okay no maybe not but please take a look we're we're live now we've already raised over 10 we're getting it from all different kinds of people people who love music people who can see the value of the scheme people who are like you in this room who just believe in the power of community our latest investor is mr andy bernham so i'd like to welcome andy to the stage thanks for investing well are you gonna or are you gonna play well morning everybody great to great to see it and actually i didn't have half your kebab but i didn't have half your sandwich last night didn't you did so i know he had to put up with a homeless sandwich instead of a kebab but anyway we didn't even give him the whole thing um so i've i've just done it i'm a member i've signed up this morning uh so i'm asking all of you to do the same uh because i think this is something uh the answers a kind of massive call that's always out there in a place like Manchester this happens to me all of the time you know you you just can be there on any given day and a kind of rush of anxiety kind of springs up over a venue uh because someone's had noticed from a a landlord you know or the lease on well we had it with a club last week uh called south there was a uh well it has closed unfortunately um night and day in Manchester currently under threat and actually you look at our city the venues we've lost i mean you know the most famous one the hacienda but there've been others that we've lost over the years this is critical infrastructure for the country that's the way i would i would describe it it's not just nice to have this is about the talent development ground for actually what what is probably britain's most famous export alongside football in these in these days it is music puts us on the world stage and yet why are we so i don't know you know casual about it i think the industry should put more back into the trust actually you know in football the football foundation the premier league all we have all criticism about it but it does give some of the tv money back to the grassroots through the football foundation where's the music industry why aren't they giving why aren't the big big venues giving some money back to the grassroots venues i mean that's a fair shout isn't it they should be putting a percentage back in to support their own their own grassroots but anyway i'm really proud to have to have signed up and uh i hope you'll you'll do the same i you might hear later on today when i speak to john i was involved as you may know with the creation of supporters direct uh just over 20 years ago and that created supporters trust across the country and when i used to go to those meetings what i used to see was kind of young people in their 20s 30s walking through the door to start talking about setting up a cooperative and it was about taking the movement to a demographic and a new generation that perhaps wouldn't wouldn't have got there by the by other other ways because they were coming in to deal with something they really cared about and i think music venues and football clubs are kind of right up there in terms of things that people really really care about care about so much that they will put their hand in their pocket on the day that they're being asked to try and try and save them and if that is then by the vehicle of a cooperative a community benefit society it takes the values of the cooperative movement to a new generation and uh you know people who perhaps hadn't thought before about about the cooperative movement and that's the power of this as well as well as it's saving these venues which are important it builds the values of the movement into a new generation uh and that's why we should all get out there and spread the word and support it so well done mark you got my uh my full support music venues trust they're a fantastic fantastic organisation uh and uh hearing well most in greater Manchester we are massively behind you great thank you very much everybody i'm sorry about that right okay we're going to go into our next session straight away so and if you can join us on the chairs and uh Cheryl Balrox so we're going to be talking about care and co-ops and and what the local opportunity is um and we've got about until 1045 on this one before you get your first refreshment break of the morning so unusually for ande this is uh this isn't this isn't for Andy to set out a a policy or an idea this is something that's it's been you know this is a learning session we are here to learn um we just talked there about things that really matter to people and health and social care is is also up there as a as a major concern for many many people um i'll just declare that i am no expert my expertise is having a husband with a chronic disease for uh 38 years and just the frustrations of the systems and the lack of strategic thinking or the lack of voice as a patient or even the wife of a patient that's even worse um so so i'm here to learn and the reason i'm here to do this is the minute that i was appointed um as CEO of co-operatives uh UK um you know continuously but one of the first things that Andy said to me when i got in post is is what can we do in in care what can we do and i don't know is the truth but i do know this something so what we're going to do today is explore that and we've got lots of people joining us with ideas and this is so that we can we can learn and take away both on behalf of co-operatives UK and uh and it is a mayor with the most significant powers actually in health and social care and developed powers because we want to lead the way and we want to find a way to give that uh voice so i'm going to start with with yourself and it's huge huge year as well as football and music huge area of passion uh for you so and so not only the health and social care but co-operatives as well just tell us a little bit about your experience and your passion and where you think the opportunities might be yeah um so people may remember rose um 10 or so years ago when i was health secretary we worked together didn't we at that at that time um i tried to reform social care and i still believe care and its broadest sense in this country needs needs quite radical reform to be honest i personally believe that social care should be provided on nhs terms where everyone contributes but then everyone is is covered for their care needs all of their care needs for all of their life but we haven't got that at the moment the bottom line is i think the profit motive does not sit well at all with with care of any kind and actually that is the problem because the more complex people's care needs become the more that that profit motive becomes a problem um because the more that the uh the system then doesn't want to to support somebody's the more expensive somebody's care needs get so you've got this is broken completely this system and it's not just adult social care did everyone see the independent children's social care review recently uh that call for a similar overhaul of of children's social care actually talks about the establishment of regional care co-ops rose and you know i'd be interested in a greater Manchester care co-op that's something we could we could work on so that's where i'm coming from you know a system that dishes out care in 15 minute visits by kind of staff who are on poverty pay uh zero hours contracts you can never ever get a care system that the country needs from from that you just can't it's unfair to the people who give care it's unfair to the people who receive care uh it means that money is is extracted out what little money we have in the care system is extracted out sometimes by unscrupulous employers it this is this is actually an area that the country is crying out for the cooperative movement to move in and bring its solutions to this broken uh damaged uh sector and uh what we waiting for well so now uh i do have an expert fortunately with me both in cooperatives and in uh care so Cheryl before we get into fair care just tell us a little bit about yourself because you're also on the board of cooperatives UK and you are also a serial co-operator i am a serial co-operator i'm the co-chair of the co-op parties disability forum and the secretary sitting here with me and i'm also the chair of sheffield cooperative development group so i have an overview of how co-ops are developed and nurtured and sustained and i was a an associate director of better government for older people i'm a mental health social worker by qualification and a community worker by practice and i'm also disabled myself my as i'm sitting here i've got people sitting over there at the table with my medical note so that if they fall if it all goes tits up i'll get a lining and i'll survive and i'm going to take Andy with me so they don't slap a dnr notice on me because i'm a trouble cause uh so i think they would like rid of me and they could do it so easily so and when i've gone into my conspiracy theory now i'll stop there the other thing before i really get into this i worked on pops partnerships for older people and we kind of gave the our results of that and i think that still stands the national health service were fantastic we were with older people disabled people we proved the pounds shillings and pens that is saved if people have adequate care they don't go into distress why why would we put people there and because i'm sitting with rodin and andy and all of you and i've got a nice uh audience i want to say some of the identity truths that we don't talk about we don't talk about what it is to be a disabled person and have to apply for PIP and be degraded in order to pay for your care we don't mention it in in public but some of us have been through it and it is degrading we don't talk about the carers who are working and still have to apply for benefits and are degraded within the benefit system we don't talk about poverty and what poverty does to people and that by the money is in the system the money is there in the system but we make that money circulate in such ways that people have to beg and be degraded in order to get a surface from money that if it was properly spent we could deliver we could deliver that properly and i'm i'm here well before i'm going to my plea i want to know do you have a photograph or some portray in your attic because you don't look any different i feel it if that's any consolation i'm gonna search your house as i find it i want the cooperators in here because i did the box yesterday for ccin to talk about the situated self and how it works the legislation the policy the framework and all of that the technical stuff but in reality although we have to acknowledge that technical stuff and the the legal aspects of how this is done for cooperators we need a mind shift too because we think in terms of businesses i love coops uk on the bike chair but we're the lab in diversion of the chamber of commerce if we really want to be service providers we have to have a service think within the co-op movement and we have to co-produce with the public sector what do you mean less institutional than our focus do you mean less focused on certain types of vehicles and institutions and more about collaboration cooperation in it as a system yeah networking yeah you talked about it a lot yesterday didn't we and there was a lot of people talking about it on on twitter and you know we did get quite a few challenges from the lights a picture about not getting caught up in the constitution the principles and actually the idea of cooperating just to magnify jump in because i think you've made a profoundly important point when i came in as mayor of greater Manchester we had a very big homelessness crisis and i said i would want to do something about rough sleeping and what i remember most about that time of trying to get everybody together was how competitive the voluntary and community sector was everyone individually thought they could solve it you know they had the monopoly on the ideas to solve homelessness in greater Manchester and i remember kind of being at a meeting saying hang on a minute you can't have egos when it comes to homelessness it's bigger than all of us you have to everyone has to sort of recognise we're all going to have to play a part in the in the whole and it was kind of important really because then we created the great much of homelessness action network really networked people and there were a range of you know social enterprises in the room and actually in the end people did start to point in the same direction and the change really did so i just wanted to sort of say that is such a profoundly we'd need to talk about cooperation within a system don't we or within a network where everyone's got their contribution but actually in the end it's the as a philosophy yes not as a business model yes and care needs treating in the same way absolutely and that's perfect perfect segue into exactly what you're doing with the with the fair care mark and we do have some slides here just pointing this out so tell us about the fair care mark and what you're trying to achieve well well as Andy said when Andy was talking did you all notice that he kept saying fair this is not fair this is not fair and we don't keep saying that because we're not a three year olds yeah we say it because it is not fair it is inherently exploitative so if you look at you know fair trade as a model we can apply fair care so we can make care there and in order to do that it has to be fair to everybody involved so as Andy said this this is a multi nodal system including the people who are informal carers i'm disabled i want ownership but i don't want ownership just as currently is known in the co-op movement now that i'm a share owner or i am a worker co-operator i am an owner which implies agency i don't know a disabled person and neither do you who wants to be a product of somebody's worker co-op or wants to be done too or wants to be done for we want to be done with and we want to move beyond co-production so in the public sector we talk about co-production and that quickly dissolves and degrades into consultation where we've already know where we want to go and we have a few people in and they nod and we get their approval that's not what we want either what we want is to bring together the relational co-operation all of you are caring for somebody i know you are and i have lots of conversations with people within without the co-op movement when you tell me your stories heartbreaking stories of your care needs or your mother's care needs or your brothers or your sons your daughters your sisters we're all in this together we really are and yet we tolerate the intolerable to ourselves and our loved ones so what i came up with with three care fair care is the three Cs is the concept which Andy outlined is that we we need to cooperate beyond our usual boundaries and what we think of as being co-operation so that's the concept and it is fair to everyone involved and it's cooperative in as much as it's mutual i care for my carers i care what happens to them i care that they have sufficient salary to live their lives of the children on uproats of impoverty i care you care we all care they care for me they come into an industry if you like a situation where they are not going to get a great salary or a career opportunity but they have an empathy that is is beyond and and above but it's not it's not a qualification you cannot qualify in empathy it's in a and we don't treat people and value people and i think some of that is about we don't value disabled people we don't value older people and people who are adjacent to the unvalued become devalued themselves so that the fairness has to be in built because that's that's what cooperation brings mutuality responsibility fairness the second is the campaign and like andy i've been campaigning for years for this so this is my big moment after all of this you know shouting and pleading here i am with rose and andy and like let's do it please please let's do it i'll get on i'll spend a lot of time on my knees but i'll get down now if if we can you know let's let's do this and the last part of those three c's is care co-ops and we have a few now they're out there on the terrain but we need to be honest about what those co-ops can do the situation in which they're trying to deliver the care and it's not about decrying anybody or saying the people in there aren't doing the best they can do but we are all in it together including the politicians because they're the ones who can legislate and change the overall system in which we can operate and i think i'll leave it there so people can join in the conversation brilliant okay so we've got um let's say the whole point about fair care and this will be launching Cheryl in the summer launching the summer Cheryl fair care fair care the mark hey hang on a minute you've stole our b logo there have you have you paid the royalties it's the great amanchester and powerful no no i haven't i have actually if you look at that logo what i did was i didn't steal it i gave a nod to if you notice um suffraject colors the suffraject colors exactly i've taken it's a guild so i'm petition andy what were you doing no i like it i like it i love it i love it i'm loving it i'm loving it i'm loving it and that should be on t-shirts i think we need exactly and the buttons and i want i want your all to go away and stick it on your banners on twitter and campaign for this that we want fair care and what we will do is i set up a guild of social and community workers cooperative it does exactly what it says on the team it is the cooperative guild of social and community workers and we've got ourselves to get there in order to help people who want to deliver care to set up a proper bonyf ID co-op yeah that will do all of that fairness that we've said we will we will walk them through it because we've got that skills that background in social work community work and cooperation so we're here we're staying we'll help you do that but also there'll be people on that panel who will assess what we've done and the journey we've been on and if that care is fair to everybody it will get the fair care mark so if you need care you'll be able to look for that mark because like andy said the the we can't change the situation yet though we will keep campaigning but the ones who are trying to do something and are getting there we will support and we will give them the fair care mark so that if you need care you can look at that and say this is a place i want to be this is the care i want to receive and this is the care i want to give fantastic so we're now going to invite like say we're trying lots of new and different things at this co-op congress 2022 and one of them is this idea of hosting so we are going to be inviting different care health and social care co-ops to tell us to make their demands in actual facts about what they want to see to empower that cooperation and for us to do more and then i am going to keep them tight on time because i'm sure these questions as well from the audience so we're going to try and get some of those in as well so i'm going to start first of all i'd like to welcome to the stage not only a brilliant social enterprise and cooperative and it's scott darra from suzer CEO of social adventures if you can come up scott and tell us all about what social adventures does and what you believe would be the key to greater cooperation morning everyone i've really been strong armed into this by roll she's doing something for me on monday she said you've got to come down and speak at the congress so i'm really glad to be here i'm scott darra i'm the chief executive of a an nhs spin out called social adventures we escaped from the nhs in 2010 just before austerity was due to hit so we run public health learning disabilities and mental health services and we set up as a community benefit society um when we when we spun out of the nhs it was really important for me to actually put the kind of control back in people's hands you know in the nhs we do some great things but often we do things to people not with people so it was really important that we did that and and as well as being the chief executive social adventures i'm really proud to be the chief executive of health care which is a homelessness refugee and asylum seeker gp practising leeds and bradford and they're set up again as a as a community benefit society so there are some really great examples across the country of where mutual approaches community ownership employee ownership has been at the heart of health and social care the problem is i don't think i think as andy said i think the real problem the elephant in the room is that we don't work very well collaboratively so we can't get the scale that we need so one of my kind of big passions is around how we can create a social prime in care and health to actually take on and go toe to toe with some of the big private sector providers and also to really reform health and social care as andy says we really need a you know a revolution when it comes to care one of the things that we're doing in in in manchester we're launching on monday a task force looking at children in care in greater Manchester that'll be i'll be having a chat with andy afterwards i'll be knobbling him over coffee and that is around kind of trying to bring more social sector organisations into children in care because that has been you know all social sector organisations have moved out of that space the public sector have and it's meant that that private sector organisations have just been extracting profit out of it at the misery of children which is just appalling so i think we need a wholesale kind of review of how these things are done i think as well some of the organisations that have spun out of the public sector and there's about 120 across the country that have done that who are set up with high levels of employee ownership and the set of social enterprises don't actually see themselves as part of the co-op movement so my big ask to to to rose is about how we bring those those care and health organisations into the co-op movement and how we make sure that we can link up with some of the the organisations in this room where they're at scale you know you're running you know big enterprises how can we partner up with those organisations because we have the expertise in health and care but you guys have got the scale and the spread to actually make these things impactful so my ask to to rose is how do we bring these organisations into into the sector and i think the other part of it is how do we create social primes to actually take on and go toe to toe with the private sector brilliant stay there scott because i'm sure there's more questions and victor add of a while yesterday who has got considerable experience in the hs was saying that 30% of all NHS contracts across the country are delivered by some form of social or community organisation and we should have an ambition to double that by creating a cooperative that like can so just talk about what you mean by a prime because this is what procurement you're talking about yeah so you know i think to create i think we can use a cooperative approach so using you know organisations that are based in place um actually building a kind of a partnership model so they continue to operate at a place level but they have the scale to actually take on some of these these like logistics things so one of the things that we did in greater Manchester about about five years ago we actually created the first health and social care limited liability partnership and we brought together nine organisations under one banner with a turnover of 53 million and that was because you know we were seeing public sector contracts kind of creeping up so the scale of those contracts were getting much too big for one organisation to be able to to be able to operate under and what we were also finding is because of the problem with competition because we've been working in these strange arbitrary markets for the last 20 or 30 years it means that organisations are often pitted against each other which actually destroys any co-operation and that means that innovation is stifled because you can't freely share your your intellectual property because you're scared that someone else will compete with you so we created the llp as a as a kind of a proof of concept really to see that that could be done and i'd like to see that model replicated in other sectors and in other parts of the country as well Andy Sherrill any comments or questions for scott oh i've got yeah if you don't mind rose um you've touched on it scott but tell tell me a bit more what is the change in commissioning behaviour that we need to see to pave the you know open up a whole new world of co-operation because i i criticised people saying working in their silos even voluntary organisations but as you say that the commissioning world has encouraged that kind of mentality hasn't it so what's the what are commissioners need to do to enable what what we all want to see so i was a commissioner in the nhs for three years i only lasted three years they told me that it wasn't for me they literally said you need to get a different job because i was pushing for some of this stuff back then i mean one of the problems with commissioning is often in a in a tender they say that they want partnership working you know often they say one partnership um but they only give you two weeks to form a partnership so what that means is you end up scrubbing around trying to build a partnership around a contract and partnerships shouldn't be built around an opportunity they should be built around they should be built around a shared set of values so i think that what we have to do is we have to be working with commissioners and commissioners have to see themselves as partners in the process and they have to shape those markets and shape those partnerships before things go out to tender so i think the idea that you can create a really meaningful value-based partnership in a fortnight two weeks before Christmas probably isn't in the work and how about social value commissioning is that being used enough and do we need to have a sort of say 20 percent social value waiting on in all care commissioning would you say i think yeah i think social value has started to kind of creep into public sector procurement which is a good thing um i think sometimes the way that it's interpreted is different depending on where you are and what contract you're going for so i think we need a bit more of a clearer understanding of what what creates social value in not just in the contract but in in terms of the the type of organization that you're commissioning so i think they need to understand that a little bit one last question i'm firing the questions at you about one last one independent children's social care review yes talks about regional care co-ops if we were to set up a great initiative care co-op just give me a sense of what that could look and feel like so one of the things that we're trying to do with the task force on monday is invite people to join become members of the task force and part of that is signing up to a shared set of values if we had if we encourage social sector organizations to get into the children in care sector you'll have 100 people setting up children's homes but it won't switch the sides in terms of actually making the change so i think one of the things for me is around having having a platform creating a platform that organizations can buy into a little bit like shared lives plus that you might have seen in in in learning disability services where people operate under one banner they sign up to the fair care mark i think you know we should be signing up to that because that sounds that sounds like what we want we want fair fair say fair pay for our workers and i think yeah we could create a platform that people could buy into so we could start operating at scale so they still get that delivery locally but they also have that scale because they're part of something bigger great fantastic right okay so thank you very much scott and now like we'd like to welcome to the hosting got about five people there and none of them know which order it's in it's the one on the website Barbara Stevens now chair of mind for you have we got Barbara with us we're not seeing Barbara this morning right okay well we find Barbara i do know Graham is here so Graham if you can join the hostings now Graham Mitchell secretary of colon valet equitable care society thank you Graham and part of the greater Manchester co-op commission as well morning everyone uh yeah sir uh uh of chair actually the uh crop of care colon valet which is a small very local community led uh social care service for adults and we're deliberately very small uh we see that as a as a key benefit uh and we are owned and controlled by a local community and the key stakeholders in our cooperative which is a multi stakeholder organisation are the people that we care for uh the people who do the work um and our group of community investors and together we're developing and designing a model for how we can take that forward our thinking all the way down the line has been to be highly replicable so we've written it all down we've documented our process so that other communities can do the same thing we very much want them to do that um in terms of procurement and commissioning i think i'd comment by saying that there's a real challenge of scale in place because commissioners looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope and they can't see the people on the ground as a result of that and that's a really common problem in commissioning and procurement so if you're going to be effective then you need to get onto the ground i think and start commissioning at a much more micro level in order to get real benefits out of that process um some local authorities can understand that and doing stuff around that i think um others less so so there's a real challenge there but on the on the other side yeah you can uh you know our vision is of a network a federal uh network of lots of little community led uh corporate organizations because my experience tells me very strongly once you start to scale up and get very big you get less cooperative well that stuff starts to get squeezed out because you need more and more professional expertise in to run the organization so you become less accountable you become less cooperative and before you know it you're in a management capture scenario so let's try and avoid that um but so what if i had an ask i'd say what we want is a well funded organization that can act as a development body to promote these small care cooperatives because they're quite easy to do i get we get lots of interest from counselors across the country in our model and we've run loads of webinars around that and we get people from right across the country coming and talking to us and interested in what we're trying to do and how and how they can replicate that in their locality but uh they don't know how to then take the next step so their well intentions um local authorities across the country seem to be well intentioned all the conversations i'm having at the moment but when it comes to actually taking action they sort of stop they get stuck they're paralyzed so we need to address that and i think um that'd be what i'd ask one right questions comments for graham uh my comment i think i'm the only disabled person that's really had a substantial voice in in talking about these co-ops and i've been in places when when we've had these discussions and people have looked at me and are not seen a disability they've seen a professional someone who's spent is a qualified social worker and i've sat in conversations when they've talked about they and them and i think that's fine if they're your personal pronouns me i prefer to be considered in the whole and in the round i'm i'm still not convinced that procurement is the way and i know it's there and we've got to acknowledge it and we've got to work with it but for the people who are being cared for procurement is not the way because it's piecemeal it's it's not what andy was talking about in terms of that care service and i think that's what we need we need andy's idea of that overarching care service because we need not to have a postcode lottery and if you're lucky that you happen to live in an area where there's lots of cooperators that want to get together and help you solve this problem well that's grand but for the rest of us you're still stuck in this really rubbish system so if what andy could campaign for as a politician is a care service that acts in effect as a secondary co-op and that's what we need we need not to get bogged down in that this is not a real co-op it can't be a real co-op because the legislation is not there but we need to have the equivalent of a secondary co-op that is working with commissioners that is doing the safeguarding because the other thing you've got to remember with these experiments with care and and i've campaigned for it is the people who are part of that experiment of vulnerable adults and children so we've got to take some care here in in what we do i'd like to see a commission a co-op commission on care where we bring people together that are trying to solve this and with that i would include the forum the disability forum in the co-op party and all the voices here in in the discussion we co-produce it with an intention to co-own it and the best form of co-ownership by a country mile is the public sector but we haven't got a public sector we've got a state sector so what co-operation can do is bring our values to the public sector so that we have we still have taxation and the way of moving money around the system in effect it's a national community wealth building opportunity for care because we're maintaining the wealth and we're circulating the wealth within that system but we're understanding this is public it belongs to us so it needs asset locking so that it can't get a value and then suddenly be dispersed and sent out because on the sidelines virgin and co are waiting to pick it up because it's become a valuable entity it needs to be asset locked it needs to be co-operative in its values for it needs to be public and looking at taxation because that is fundamentally the best way we have in the uk of shared ownership thank you go on today yeah you guys following on from that if i'm hearing you just saw i'm hearing you correctly small but federated is what your scale up scale out yeah so you get a network of organisations each of which is stays rooted in their local community but that's why Cheryl's right about the secondary for what though isn't it so that everyone or what scott was saying everyone's buying into the same values completely across the federated network yeah and then so one last thought and this is maybe one for you Rose i mean i always kind of come back to supporters direct i love it and you know it was such a because obviously you've got people coming to see you and everyone's trying to reinvent the wheel in their own little community aren't they and then as you say failing uh supporters direct for those who know about it was all about make it easy model constitution you know here's supporters trust in a box we used to say you know that it do we need a supporters direct for care is what i'm trying to say a central enabling unit for me there's a real opportunity to take action on that it's it's low cost you know let's just get on do it yeah there's everything we need is in place central support function that rather than everyone coming knocking on rose that's one for you then there's it not okay brilliant now that's really helpful Graham right okay i'm going to thank you Graham i'm now going to invite Pete Westall who is head of co-op social responsibility at the mid counties co-op you've seen lots of mid counties co-op over congress they are also responsible for the emo pads which i'm sure some of you have been trying out but Pete if you can tell us a little bit about what your co-operative does in and what kind of care and what you think we need to do to enable greater co-operation i need to stay close with mike so thank you for that and both of you really just a passion of this stuff um so where do we come from in mid counties we've always said about intervening in broken markets and it's something i think everybody in this room would say yes that's what you should do mid counties co-op we've got proud record of doing that we've done it with co-op energy specifically we've done it with co-op childcare which i want to talk about in a second but the point about co-operation can make a difference there is a little known co-op which started two years ago co-op group are involved in mid counties are involved in called bright futures co-op bright futures co-op helps victims of modern slavery and the reason it's set up as a co-op is you have referral partners such as hope for justice such as hope he has foundation or whatever sitting on the board you have business partners sky morrisons curries mid counties co-op group sitting on the board but you can also have room for victims of modern slavery sitting on the board and i think that strikes to the heart of what we're all trying to say it's the people who are using the system are the ones we've got to get that voice from mid counties have got co-op childcare and the reason childcare is successful 47 nurseries spread across the length and breadth of the uk is because we have representatives of parents and children sitting making decisions on a daily basis how should that nursery work that's the model which for me is co-operation is finest but there's an issue we've got in co-op childcare and there's an issue and the i think which we need political support on we've got 47 nurseries which operate this is a bit where i'm going to notes 30 individual local authority areas every single one of those local authority areas operates in a totally different way so from a funding point of view we get £4.24 per hour in Gloucester £6.80 per hour in Westminster it's a 60% difference for offering exactly the same service you try running a national business with that sort of funding causes you a problem but there's more each local authority has a different portal each local authority pays at different times each local authority will either give you one remittance or they break it down into separate chunks i passionately agree with what we should be doing here but it's this consistency basis is perhaps the fourth C i would add on to say yes we need collaboration yes we need cooperation but the consistency of author has to be there and that's what we're struggling with from a childcare point of view it just breeds inefficiencies so yes federal co-ops yes regional co-ops but within a framework of consistency wow thank you very much Pete right okay any um well that's just like me i'm a little cute for my feet for the whole of the congress in the fall off bitch yeah i have that effect on people don't you yeah so questions for Pete then any question either of yet i agree with it yeah absolutely and actually i apologized in advance and now i totally agree with you and that's why i think we need that overarching secondary co-op because we we need a relational at scale in neighborhoods small micro co-ops but over that let the people care care let the people who do the administrative can can manage all those competing pay points etc let them do that the people who are good at that let them do that let everybody do what they're good at but cooperate to do it for the benefit of all of it fantastic thank you go on quick well i've been up i know we're always all of us skeptical about uh health service reorganisations but to try and be optimistic could the move to integrated care systems help if it's done right yes because it's a consistency argument and the the bit which occasionally you forget and i will say that rose is really re-invigorated i think this movement on us 12 months we can do this we've got successful examples of people setting up co-ops why not but the wide ambition so that's what we should be doing over the next decade absolutely yes fantastic thank you very much hey right i think we've got our final hostings glinn meredith is glinn here yeah brilliant okay so glinn is from the Cotrefby co-op and i am going to push you on time on this one because we've got about six or seven minutes left and i think there's going to be some questions as well from the audience so um over to you glinn for what you think we need to do yes just a big thank you for welcoming me that so Cotrefby Cymru is a learning disability charity set up as a co-operative in Wales turned over just over 30 million operating in 17 of the 22 local authorities one of our biggest challenges really is the national council sign-up in Wales there's only one of the 22 local authorities and day-to-day working with councils they very much struggle to understand the co-operative model and my question is really and he's great as a politician to hear you passionately talk about co-optives but how can we change council's attitudes to actually make a real difference the next decade oh go on no you go shall no i spent 20 years in a local authority and we don't get up in a morning and think how are we going to make people's lives terrible but we're institutionalised and just like you know we have an escapee from the national health service it's not only the patients who are institutionalised in the health service so are the workers you know and ruskin was a great co-operator said when you hire a pair of hands you get the brain for free and we don't liberate the brain and we don't liberate the brain of our carers we don't liberate the brain of our disabled people children adults we don't liberate that because the care should be there to give you the ability to be the best you can be to live your best life that doesn't matter if you work in care or you're in receipt of care the care should be mutual so the only way we can do it is to speak to those people who are still captured because they've got Nolan they've got principles you know the people in the public sector and the voluntary sector have principles we have principles although they tend to come to us and say you know i'm constantly saying we've got seven values and principles not five magic beans so the elephant in the room is that we just don't put enough money into care but even if we did put money into care would we want to put money into care and then replicate what we've got now so the answer is no so these two things that we've got to get is we've got to have sufficient resources and we've got to liberate the people out of what is a tragic care system and that doesn't matter where you are in this system if you're the care worker who's salary is not sufficient to raise your children and you can't go in holiday in you know in term time but that's the only holiday you can afford we are tracking people in such degraded situations and it affects us all so really i don't think that you would have to try that hard if you were sitting down talking to people in the public sector and telling the human stories that they are also part of i think it's easy to beat them up and i think we all feel frustration at times with councils but i'm going to try and answer i'm going to try and explain why we are where we are before we can try and help them if you like change i think we are where we are because they've had what three decades of tendering and you know and running all of these uh sort of exercises market testing you know that's been the world that they've been in and i have to say the government i was in didn't change it enough so they've kind of been in that sort of lowest cost sort of environment haven't they in terms of procurement for a long time you add a decade of austerity on to that which is kind of whittled out actually experience commissioning staff from you know so the capability is not brilliant if we're honest in in some of the councils not no criticism of the individuals it's just that they've lost staff and then the third thing just to add in is the on top of that the world in which they live is like annual funding rounds where they haven't got enough so how can they break out you know to be fair to them show how can they break out when they got an annual budget on top of everything that's gone before that mentality that's been hardwired into them about lowest cost tender and all of that i think it's it's a sort of paradigm shift is what it needs isn't it you almost got to kind of sell them a come and take a 10 year approach to this working with local local organisations building wealth in communities you know break out of you know take a risk on the you know the funding will be there for 10 years and that i think is and then have a sort of and empower them to sort of think differently along the lines that Cheryl's saying that they won't break out of it if they're stuck in this sort of cycle of one year funding you know you know compulsive you know competitive tendering that that's the sort of thing they've got to be able to encourage to break out of so thank you very much glint very much appreciated i am going to let us run five minutes over because i'm fairly certain we're going to get some questions from from the floor have we got questions right there you go so i knew that i can't do all that in five minutes i'm going to be mean andy you pick who you want your questions we've probably got time for two questions so there we go we've got later here hello my name's Barbara Wersley i'm an MCC member for central co-op so that's who i am rose i love your logo and i love it for two reasons one is that it actually has a b in it and i come from blackburn in Lancashire and we have three bs we're just down the road from Andy in Manchester so we have two more than you so i love it for that i also love the fact that you have you've chosen the colours of the suffragettes and that's perfect for me because one of the things that i feel quite passionate about is that people who are in care whether they be old or young often aren't able because of capacity or whatever to be able to vote and i feel that the carer who has responsibility for a lot well the rest all of their life choices i would like to see a movement to enable the carer to have the right to vote on behalf of the person they're caring for and the reason i say that is because notice respect Andy but politicians rely on votes and there is a whole host of people who do not vote particularly those in care and i think if they were to add the voting to the voting community then i think they would have a voice and i think it's very sad that we don't have one because that fly and it could be because is that something that could could happen i guess the issue would be how do you know that the person is using the vote true to what that do you know what i mean what that person wants to vote for i guess is the issue isn't it that's the i see no i'd take your point yes yeah i can see what you're saying i mean if someone could like do a sort of advanced direction that elections i authorised somebody to vote for me but i want them always to vote this way i don't know you could do it that way couldn't you or you know so that you could have a league anyway but i'd take your points entirely i mean i see i see yeah i get it very good point very good point let me see your hands again i've got one more question in the time of one more question so where do we want to direct the microphone and how do you mean i feel by that i know i've got that i lean driver um what um you've stirred us to action what action could everybody in this room take uh within the next 48 hours that would help and is there any good practice in other countries that could be integrated into today's care and co-ops yes yes there is good practice however i would i would put a cautionary warning on the it's it's situated i've been to Milan and you know i've studied Japan and there are great things but we are where we are and for us it's the interface between the decision it's the decision making that happens with the government in effect that takes in our tax receipts and then disperses them and that is one of the major places where this system is broken so i would say in these dirty action please let us know if it comes back to us and say i'm interested i want to get behind this i want to because there's a campaigning aspect to this and get your MPs behind this and get and get everybody riled up about this we ought to be riled up about this it's a national scandal so there's that aspect of it but then also say if you want to have a big debate about care on what we can do about care these people here from retail societies these people here from worker co-ops we're all here in this room we've all got some capacity that we're not pulling together we're cooperators and the other plea that i would make is for principle seven principle seven is i call it the much malnourished principle seven and it's where social and community should we should live there and inhabit that and build from that because care is not a business even with the best intentions care should not be a business and that's where Andy started so we've got to think out of the box as cooperators or how can we cooperate socially and community where yes there's some aspects will be business of course we've got to transact some business but this is relational this is the relational side of cooperation it needs to have the informal aspects of people we care for our families and our friends and our people that's informal care but that can't be turned into exploitation and it's cooperation that understands mutuality that understands that one minute final word what the thing you saw right Eileen say what's the the call to action and i think we all should get behind fair care and actually unison's ethical care charter as well i think that's worth a shout out as well they've done brilliant work a little bit of little glimmer of hope when it comes to commissioning all 10 great demands to councils now we've signed up to the real living wage for i know it feels like small steps but they are they have and they'll all will pay it from next year so there is some change happening i think the thing that just the takeaway for me is there's an opportunity for the co-op movement to articulate the solution to social care in this country under the banner of a national care service now people hear that phrase and they think it's the statutory sector taking over everything and i know that would kind of cause some concern to to people who don't want to see that kind of medicalization if you like of of of social care so i think there's an opportunity rose to say the national care service is about the entitlement isn't it what what everyone should be entitled to as a right and that's what the n is there isn't it you set the and i think there's an opportunity to describe a cooperative delivered national care service using this model that we've heard about from scott graham and others today you know about small federated networked networked across an ics you know can have across the ics era networking co-ops to deliver national care service standards and i think that there's a there's a big policy there for a certain political party where it wants to be bold enough to go for it it requires that injection of funding by the way from taxation of one kind or another but then that's how i i think this thing needs to be built because people who receive care don't necessarily want care to be all top down and told what to do i absolutely get that so the co-op movement is actually the the place where we need to build a 21st century care service for britain and i think there's a general election looming you rose the one to sort of say how do the co-op how does court movement deliver a national care service and then try and pitch that to political parties one in particular well thank you for your fortune when we get back on we will yeah we will um thank you thank thank you very much for that breeze every time i have a conversation with you i'll get another job so that's very helpful right we've got 10 minute turnaround now to get into uh your other rooms we've got sessions on community shares we've got finance sessions we've got a heritage session and right here like i say i changed the programme we've not got tracy braving but we have got john robb talking to andy about tackling the status quo for you leave big thank you to all our hostings and our panel here brilliant session as as we anticipated for this session we i think we've got uh many more people online than in the room but um we've got an exciting conversation so it should have been as we know uh tracy braving uh in conversation with andy bernham but we are absolutely delighted that we've got uh john uh robb very uh credible and well known uh journalist and uh real campaign up for uh climate action as well so i'm going to hand straight over now and this session is now tackling the status quo so as well as john and andy we are going to be joined on screen by the sea sorry by the one of our federals the football supporters association who we're working closely with so andy walsh is joining us on the screen as well so over to you john thank you okay thanks rose so um well what's interesting about this panel we're going to start with the football thing and talk about the future of football and is working within the context of the cooperative movement as well which i think is really great you've done a lot of work in this before this is this not a new idea so i guess what was actually let's talk about the work you've done with this before because remember on that tour we did years ago the hills were a tour yes we're going to talk about them that was that round about that time absolutely by giving the fans the control over football again yeah absolutely so i was saying earlier today 20 years ago just over actually we set up supporters direct um and it was at a time when uh obviously people were moving into clubs in the lower divisions dodgy intentions assets being stripped um and it was a movement that we built and it grew really quickly um i think looking back maybe it didn't have enough kind of weight behind it you know with government funding councils but still it made a massive difference and yeah i always kind of felt maybe that the idea of supporter ownership was still something that a certain group of fans kind of felt passionate passionately about but the wider fanbase was a bit like more more skeptical then you bring it right up to date bang up to date european super league 50 plus one became a kind of call didn't it that everyone was buying into the whole because everyone could then feel it and see it then that their club was at risk of this just being kind of ripped out of its community ripped out of its league lose its ground you know no no club safe you know we've got old them athletic supporters with us today you know everyone feels for them in the situation that they're in but it could be any of us you know my club nearly got relegated this year what would have happened then with all of that you know so i think finally the pennies dropped with everybody that clubs are not safe in the current structure of football and therefore what makes club safe supporter community ownership that's the only thing that really guarantees the long-term future of your club and i think the idea has been building over the last 20 years but it's definitely an idea whose time now has fully come i mean andy is here yes hello andy i mean you're an example of this aren't you as somebody who's actually built a club up from the fans support from the grass roots you and a number of people then went with self fc and i it which i was a reluctant convert to at first but i was the general manager for 11 years and we built crowds to over 3 000 over 5 000 members certainly the appetite air of football fans in Manchester and i'm currently working with very fans in rescuing their club after the demise there as well we've got over 40 clubs now across the country at all levels who are fully or majority owned by their supporters and so the movement is growing it does need support from from from policy makers and from people within the game because supporters provided stability that andy just talked about there you know the the launch of supporters direct 20 years ago it was a new concept cooperatives and neutrals were new but in football it was and that that consciousness and awareness of football fans um of what was possible is greater now than it was then you know andy talked about the 50 plus one rule i level when in 98 99 that we were arguing against the Rupert Murdoff take over in Manchester United we were in conversations with Barcelona and Joanne LaPorte who was then a leader of the supporters pressure group Elefanta Blau and approached us and asked us the support for what they were doing and whilst Joanne's tenure as president of Barcelona has not been what we would recognise as a sort of standard supporter ownership model it did join what could be done by supporters um with a proper campaign to actually um have an influence over their football i mean do you see it as a model that works in more grassroots end of football i mean you talk about Barcelona which is obviously the other end of football or do you see it as a future model for all football clubs certainly you know in in football terms managers come and go players come and go owners come and go but the supporters don't supporters are there for the long term and the supporters are there putting money in week after week and for nothing more than the support for their community and their football clubs and football is the biggest expression of community identity that this country has and i think if you if you look at the way that loyalty to the club is exploited by bad actors in the game those bad actors morph year on year into different interventions in the game at the moment we've got we've got crypto as a threat to football you know at a time when crypto has lost a third of its or 70 percent i should say it's only a third of its value that it was last autumn crypto is now moving into football because that's an area where they see being able to exploit their exploit their advantage with the cash that they've got so i think it's further up the leagues clubs and leagues themselves that or football authorities need to involve fans because fans are not just cannon fodder they're the people who provide stability to the game i mean these are very much core values of the corporate movement as well aren't they which so this is why this is a really interesting topic it's kind of populist topic but also kind of chimes work the core values of this kind of congress as well aren't they is that something you're really interested in as well most definitely i think supporters direct is now merged with the football support federation and we are now the football support association and all those support our own clubs and those support our trusts so we're 100 trusts across the professional game where many of them have have a stake in their in their football club what we need now is a review of the policy framework and the legislative framework to ensure that the rights of fans are embedded within the ownership and governance of their football clubs and that's why we're really excited by the conversations we've been having with Andy over the last few weeks about looking at the new political framework we have with with the combined authorities and the powers that they have what can they do what can politicians like Andy and others do to support activists in their community who are looking for mutual ownership of their club or just having a stake in their club and ownership brings with it not just a recognition from the majority owners of the club but also it gives supporters participation rights and empowers them supporters in terms of their own engagement with the club and what they can actually do the participation and their their ownership of the club the ownership of the club brings i mean yeah you're saying what what politicians like you do yeah well i've got massive respect for Andy and everything that he's done to promote supporter ownership of football from the days campaigning against the glazer takeover and and everything since and i it's just brilliant for me to know that what supporters direct built all those years ago is now in his hands work as part of out of the football supporters association so learning from what we've all been through the kind of thought in my mind was well how do we give him more backing when he's talking to Oldham or whoever about taking uh taking a stake because you know we we often do get you know with Barry it was too late that it was when we were asked to get involved the thing was too far gone so what we've got to do is create a support system that is actually an evolution of what we were doing with supporters direct so this is the task force that we're announcing today great to manage the combined authority cooperatives uk football supporters association a tripartite agreement saying we're going to create a support system behind supporters who are trying to take control of their club and obviously Oldham athletic are the club you know this spotlight moves around doesn't it and now it's on Oldham and we want to prove hopefully this new concept with Oldham to say we're going to stand behind them we're not dictating anything by the way it's the the supporters are deciding what they want to do and how they want to do it but we're just the enablers behind them and these three organisations now between us we have some considerable heft between us to sort of back them back them up and you know it's for the long term it's not like a quick fix or you know we're just saying we're going to be there it's not a fair weather thing we'll be behind you and then if it works for Oldham maybe other clubs will step forward and ask for the same support so that's what we're announcing John it's the mayoral combined authority if you like providing the government side of things and obviously co-ops UK and FSA doing the sort of direct front line work so it's basically providing a structure and maybe advice or is there actually more practical things to give to you I mean how do you take over a football club if you're fans I mean how can how can these two guys take over Oldham athletic from a dodgy owner well it's a it's a community benefit society isn't it approach possibly a community share offer and I think Andy's working on those kind of things anyway with with the supporters without I mean it's for Oldham supporters to talk about the detail but here there's a kind of issue about the ground being in different ownership and that might present a good first step if you like to secure to secure the club something that wasn't open to to bury fans so it's about all of those things every club situation will throw up different complexity but it's about having the three partners standing behind to unlock that with with the sport isn't the thing about a democratic organisation and not for profit organisation it's much easier for an organisation like mine to get become an investor in community football than it is if it's you know a direct you know a kind of company that's a bit shady you know and that's why it can give confidence to the public sector to support particularly if we look at boundary park I mean I just put this thought out there but it could be more than a football stadium couldn't it it's got the space around it to be a community cooperative hub actually with football at its heart but that building out the identity of the Oldham community as Andy said you know in this day and age what else speaks to the identity of places more than the football club it does nothing actually and if Oldham athletic was lost it would be a catastrophe for the town and the borough of Oldham a catastrophe and we can't let it happen yeah you're probably like my generation of people that all towns of Britain that I'd ever heard of or football clubs when I was growing up I wouldn't even know his place has existed you know yeah so I knew all the grounds as well did you yeah yeah all of them from the 70s and even backtracking yeah so that idea and I've always liked that idea the football clubs are more than just the football club it's a community hub but also it should be a multi you know a facility place shouldn't it for all different types of activities absolutely and to be fair to them I mean we beat them up at times but a lot of them are I mean you know everyone can have their debates about the ownership of different clubs but you can't dispute the fact that Manchester City have invested quite a lot in East Manchester I mean that is just they have I mean or you look at that my club Everton what they do in the community is is outstanding actually and it's not a fake commitment it's a real commitment and you could there's lots more examples but what what what we could have though is more kind of permanent benefit and more supporter control because all clubs get themselves at times into positions where they're taking decisions that go against the grain of what what the supporters feel and we've got to prevent these these crises happening and put clubs on a much firmer foundation for the for the long run so the minimum would be having supporters representing on boards and the maximum will be having the supporters actually run the I've always had a little bit I don't know how Andy thinks about it because we had these debates 20 or so years ago on the football task force you can't have a token supporter on the board I don't particularly favour that just oh just a fan on the board and that's it it's going to be a supporter with the backing of an ownership stake on the board to you know to be in the room as a as an equal not as a token so I think the ownership is a really important part of it ownership of the core assets the ground that's what I think we should work to a supporters trust owning the ground leasing it to the owners and therefore the therefore the supporters not not the flimsy fits and proper persons test that the the football authorities do or don't apply actually in the case of Alden if Alden's what has owned the ground they would be interviewing the owners who come on because they'd have to lease the ground from them do you see what I mean I mean that is such a sort of strength of position that you can put football supporters in if they're they're the ones who are controlling the asset and they are the ones interviewing the prospective owners and and you know then then football will have its its kind of its its fundamentals in the right place interesting because that chime to the music venue trust campaign for the music venues to actually own the venues as well isn't it so it's the powers and the bricks in the sense absolutely uh I was just talking about music venues critical national infrastructure I called it but I would say the same about uh football grounds across the country and everything that goes on inside them around them uh these are incredible places aren't they of community of togetherness of debate sometimes you know but these these are places uh that that bind us together bind communities together times when you've got very divisive politics going around towns you know the football club is the one place where people coalesce and kind of you know look outwards a bit and you know and you just can't lose that you can't sort of have it on the hanging on the whim of some some so-called savior who's going to come in from where god knows where but gambling with these clubs every time they're sold there's a massive gamble with a proud English name of a proud football club and it's kind of like you know it's it's high stakes isn't it and we've got to take that that out of it and uh you know I just take my hat off to to Andy and every the work he does he does painstaking work because it is painstaking work it's not easy uh but you know I think um with this partnership today maybe we can put some more power behind his elbow and you know get get more progress I mean uh Justin there's a size but another one to look out for is Derby County I heard it might only have two weeks left well I don't know if Elaine is is here today because uh Elaine is heavily heavily involved think she's uh heard enough from me she's gone off to another another meeting but Andy do you know something about the Derby County situation because I think it is pretty critical isn't it liquidation is even being mentioned isn't it it is critical in is that I'm not I'm not closely involved in the Derby County situation my colleague is is working with that but again Derby one of the biggest issues we have is support understanding of the issues and that um that it's it's not so much an education piece but people know what the issues are it's about support understanding what their power is and what their influence they can bring and the situation with Derby would be much better if if it was followed by Andy was saying there about the asset being in the ownership of the community um you know just pick it up um a point you made there John about um about other examples at Bering um the last two owners who came into the club gambled with the club's assets that have been built up over generations this isn't you know they they they come in and buy a club for a for a small amount because the club's in distress but they they recognise these new owners they recognise the value in the bricks and mortar to the extent that they then leverage them for borrowing to bring money in for revenue and that shouldn't be allowed you know they shouldn't be allowed to to leverage the assets that have been built up over generations that have also been built up not just by football fans but the local community and the taxpayer who's given tax breaks through council tax relief or through um HMRC relief football itself generally through grants that's not there to be exploited by private capital that's there as community wealth that's been put in by the broader community not just those with war fans so there's a there's an undeniable argument that these assets should be in the hands of the community and a bit of a warning here to other clubs as well all of them are the first club from the Premier League era to crash out of the professional game into non-league and that's a club that traditionally can command crowds in excess of premiership clubs virtually half the championship clubs it's a warning to the likes of Burnley who've gone down the route of high stakes private capital investment on the basis they're going to stay in the Premier League you know it's it's it's the casino economy on coke it's madness and we need politicians and policy makers to protect those assets from exploitation of private capital and Andy I hope you do everything you can for olden but don't let them bring back that plastic pitch they did all right with the plastic pitch we've got some olden fans as well it'd be good I don't know if yeah I mean we're I mean we've got the mic here yes whereabouts are you what whereabouts up to in the campaign are you so yeah uh yeah good good afternoon everybody I'm paul whited from the olden mathematics sports foundation with me is domlow who's also from the foundation um we're at a fairly early stage I think John um we've had meetings over the last couple of weeks with Andy and Rose and we're beginning the process now uh Andy Burnham alluded to the club it's it's in a difficult position there's no doubt about it we have just dropped out of the football league after 115 years of membership we're owned the club he's owned by an absent owner who hasn't been in the country for months the ground is in separate ownership we are engaging somewhat with the owners of the ground with a view to seeing what we can do about that and we are looking to convert to community benefit society over the next six to eight weeks ideally if we can get our if we can get a move on and then look towards a community share offer which will give us a sizeable amount of money hopefully which we can then invest ideally in the stadium to do again the things that Andy Burnham talked about which is making a community hub again reach out to all sections of the community and I think Oldham have probably failed in that in the past and we see some of the work that Blackburn are doing with with some of the ethnic communities in Blackburn and Oldham has a similar population we need to do more there um we'd like to win a few games we haven't done that for a very long time I'm not sure if Dom's ever seen us win more than half a dozen games a season um but yeah so uh we are at an early stage we thank both Andy's and Rose from co-ops UK for their invaluable support over the last few weeks and we hope to make significant progress over the next couple of months to help us build a stake to bring the club back into local ownership for local people good we know you working with are you working with other clubs at all so we've had a lot of support from across the football community I mean just a recent example um the club announced a friendly with bollwn wanderers bollwn fans um came out in their droves and said our club should not be supporting uh their owner and they managed to get their club who listens to their fans to call off that game so we're not playing that game with them anymore which puts it puts that pressure that public pressure back and puts our owner in the spotlight and we've had that support from across across the country not just locally we've had late in orient fans uh collecting outside wembly for us uh the FA cup um and you know with their help and with the help of uh other football fans old and fans but other old um uh other football fans as well uh we've already raised in donations over 50 000 pounds what about other fan groups because I'm a blackpool fan and we were stuck with probably dod your zone of the whole lot but we found that Liverpool very good spiritually lots of great advice lots of other people what scares his owners more than anything is actually when the cooperative goes on beyond just the fans of one club in cooperative but all the clubs it scares them absolutely yeah and I mean uh Christine said in the rest of the the blackpool uh supports just they've been uh probably our number one supporter uh alongside uh it was six easy points for us but I've been blackpooled young so I know but the solidarity between the fans is what scares him and it which is a core to probably a lot of co-op ideas across not outside football as well I think yeah absolutely I mean we've been uh you know this past season old and fans have been protesting right there next to us late in orient fans other other football fans we recognise the issues the other clubs are having like Darby like Barry are having the past like Rochdale have had recently as well with um you know hostile takeovers uh being mooted we're here it stands shoulder to shoulder with every other football fan who has issues uh we're all different and complex but we're there to support each other whether that's financially or um emotionally or getting out on our feet and protesting or standing next to each other yeah definitely I mean obviously you've been speaking to you've been speaking to Andy haven't you and yeah so I mean what advice have you been giving these guys about what they need to do and I guess another club does well I guess it's different for every club different situations different types of clubs different types of owners but is there a general thing that fans could do is it just basically just organise and agitate or is there more that people can do? I think um I think I'd tell me how after the to the orient fans for the for the way that they've responded in not just expressing their um their oppositions at the way the club has been managed over 20 years really not just the last four or five years of lance again but um they've they've held together you know they've people have held together as a group they've not all been going again because they don't want to give um the current owners the money but they've held together as a group and in in that period of turmoil football's no different anything else Splinter's developed between the supporters of the club and is what we've seen over the last uh few months as fans recognising that despite the differences that they've had in the past over things that have been said or not said or done or not done that they that they need to to have that solidarity that Don talked about there and the discussions we've been having the last few weeks about coming together behind a community benefit society with the opportunity of raising community shares is one of those elements which co-op the co-opsy movement has provided football that wasn't there 10-15 years ago you know I was involved with FC United in the first pilot scheme of community shares and we raised an excessive two million quid for building the grounds in north Manchester and alongside that the fans then put in another million quid in terms of donations and went up all fans and put that kind of cash in the business community and all the grant agreements and the local authority can say okay you've made a commitment we'll back you and that's the message that we've been discussing with Paul and Don over the course of the last few weeks is that if we can come together despite all those past differences this is something a bit bigger now this is about what we can all do together with the co-op movement with the likes of Andy's office and GMCA to get some real cash together we're already talking to local business community about them coming in and supporting us as well for a future for the club and start then to have some conversations with the owner and say look you know bygones be bygones the club is now in a desperate situation it's lowest point as Paul's set for over 100 years what are we going to do if you really care about this group what are we going to do together and then let's let's have a fresh challenge and that money is that money is very achievable if we can raise two million quid xc and i with a fan base of four or five thousand all them can reach out to 20 000 people so the amount of money that they possibly could raise really is disguised as a limit I guess it's a fast learning curve for you guys because basically you just fans you just want to go and watch football don't you but now now you've got to work out to take over a club and run it and but I mean do you have a plan of action apart from an emotional response to the situation or is there like a manifesto or a plan or there is a plan that we've been working on internally for the future of football club and what we want it to look like and that is focused on the team the academy because young players are always going to be important for clubs like ours the facilities of the stadium we've already touched on and the community and those are the four sort of planks of our business plan moving forward we because of the fractured relationship with the owner the one thing we haven't been able to do a great deal about at the moment is put some finances into that business plan because we've no idea what's going on with the finances of the club as it stands we've got statutory accounts but the small company account is telling you virtually nothing so that is the one thing that's missing from our plans at the moment but we've certainly got a plan for all those other elements that we want to bring together for the good of the town the club and the community I mean Andy do you think I mean this has been bumping up for years and it's not just old and we talked about this before there's been other clubs other situations campaigns that you start before organisations started before do you think this is finally the turning point we're getting to I do I feel it is and I think the european super league really was that sort of moment where everyone went you know what the game can't be run like this anymore and everyone did come together at that at that moment so much so that there is legislation on football arriving in the commons fairly fairly soon a regulator not before time but that's an opportunity isn't it that legislation to amend it to expand it to pick up some of the points that Andy was was talking about about before john so no I think we finally have hit the point where the argument is one clubs should be if not wholly owned by supporters certainly supporters should be a major investor in in in clubs I don't think I think in legislation we should have a 50 plus one rule well we should be building to 50 plus one as an ownership that's where we should be going as a country I think so that clubs are majority owned by supporters on that german model that can't be done overnight but what I think you could have is a 50 plus one rule over fundamental decisions affecting the future of the club not being by law having to have 50 plus one of the season ticket holders so that you've got to stop these things building over time haven't you they kind of you know they they I mean Elaine's here now and I don't know whether she wants to say anything about Derby but the trouble is decisions get made in boardrooms that are going to explode on the fans two years down the line and I think you've got to get to a situation where we stop that happening and there's a statutory requirement to have a majority of season ticket holders support when any fundamental changes being made to the ground the league they play in the colours they play and what anything like that so changes coming on yeah and that building parliament the co-op movement is going to have to make a I think we need a big campaign around that legislation when it comes to make sure we get the maximum benefit for football supporters from it so do we have to wait for when Labour will win the next election for this or is it well I think to be fair Tracy Crouch who was the former sports minister and I like Tracy you know and she did a good job with her fan-led review I think most people would probably agree with that what you want to see is that fan-led review coming into the legislation Andy do you agree with that I think I think I think Tracy did do a very good job I think one of the best reports that we've seen but the current state of the of parliament and the economic situation we've still got to maintain the pressure that that legislation is brought to the house and is actually passed and then there's a battle that's been indicated there about what the regulator actually does and as an organisation we're working with the football authorities you know we've been talking to the FA football league and the Premier League about how the fan-led review will be implemented already and the Premier League have responded with talking to us about a new supporter engagement model it's not ownership but it's support engagement model they've recognised that that fan-led review is talking about golden shares and about giving some protection to the to the games key heritage assets. Andy is it realistic Andy to have leveraged buyouts on the kind of basis of Manchester United and Burnley made illegal? I would hope so but I would also I would also say it was Richard Caborn who turned up down at Manchester United so it's we've got and when we when we lobbied to then lay the government to stop the glazing takeover Richard Caborn battered it back over the net and said he was quite happy with what was going on with the glazers and I think that was really because the strength of the support movement then wasn't what it is now you know Paul talked very eloquently before about the solidarity that they've received from support groups that's not organised by others the FSA that's just fan groups recognising common purpose and common aids and coming to the aid of other supporters that wasn't around in 1999 when we were fighting the glazers it is now because more and more supporters are replacing that and that puts pressure on all politicians and I would call on you know the political arm of the co-op movement the co-op party to work with us to help develop policy that then supports those well-being individuals from whichever party they're from who want to see real change to cement the football community in the harder game it gives fans of real voice okay so Derby county then yes Derby county find themselves in a rather a mess at the moment and having extricated ourselves back in 2005 from previous owners we formed a trust in 2002 and then we had previous owners that were really bad they were actually sent to prison um and we thought everything was fine and then we've got a local owner local um millionaire own multimillionaire owner and we thought everything would be fine it didn't turn out to be fine at all um he's taken out loans he's done all sorts of weird financial dealings ending up with being deducted 21 points this season and relegated to league one and we are now in the position that the fixtures are out Monday um and we don't have uh an owner we are in administration facing liquidation um and there is nothing that the fans can do about it the trust are taking um you know taking them to task and trying to hold their sort of feet to the flames but we're not getting very far because there's not a lot you can do when the administrators don't seem to be talking to some of the people who are trying to buy the club so one of those people has now taken out a lawsuit so this is all dragging it on longer and longer and longer and we don't know if we'll have a club next week so they're basically just paralyse it in the courts to stop you taking control is that what they're doing yes well there's there's no way that the trust can take on a club the size of darby county with possibility of debts up to or more than 50 million pounds isn't there's just no way that you can take on that sort of thing and that's how it's built up plus um the owner sold himself the stadium uh so he owns the stadium which is not in administration whereas the club is so they're two separate entities it's the biggest model i think i've ever heard of um and it's something we are fighting for and it's something we're desperately um trying to sort out and trying to take advice um but that just doesn't seem to be anything that the ordinary supporter can do we have gates regularly 30 000 people you know so a club that size going down that's a start if you've got 30 000 people that's an army isn't it so it's it is yeah and and uh hearing what we're saying earlier about um fans turning on one another that that does happen as well when you find yourself in adversity that splinter groups set up and people saying what's you know what's the trust doing what's the trust doing they know use this that this that all they want to see it on the board and it's just not true but we have actually um yesterday managed to get a letter sent to the administrators and the EFA which has been agreed by all the um five main supporter groups and signed by all of us so we're hoping that that has some action but i was very grateful don't know if he is here and out of here he gave me some very good advice um over the weekend about uh how you can approach the business secretary um who has the power to intervene with administrators i didn't know that so that's something we'll probably be um i mentioned it to Andy last night it's something we'll probably be doing um in the next day or so something important there though elaine about administrators isn't they because you know they supposedly come in they were appointed by the the former owner yeah and i understand they're the ones they had at portsmouth they don't seem to be administrating very much who regulates the administrator and if you're on up three million pounds worth of costs that they want to be paid so i mean would you have advice in that situation Andy i mean it's obviously not up to you to say the club but i i just remember with wigan uh because they were in this position you know you think administration can bring you a whole new range of issues um you know and that's you know well darby obviously looking down that barrel a little bit at the moment so i think it's great that elaine's spoken because we i think we need obviously we're rallying round old until i do think we do need to rally around the ram's trust as well at the moment because you know it's pretty dire situation for them i think john if i may just uh just to say there about administrators uh they are one of the problems and the administrators are you know she used to another allergy there the people who were who were sitting there looking after the the financial and collapse of the club the first people they paid for themselves and they take sometimes quite extortionate fees we saw we saw that at berry as well where the administrator there is always going to look after themselves and the lack of regulation yeah a lot of legislation covering administrators is is a real problem we we've made complaints directly to the regulators of uh of insolvency recovery specialists and they've been by the way and you know you look at some of not going into the details here but you look into some of the some of the antics that the administrators made at darby county it's a scandal they've laid more debt on the football club that was there when they took over and they want to keep their fees out of that it's it's very very loose legislation because these people traditionally are looking after companies that are in collapse they're looking to try and salvage something for the creditors and there's a load of bottom feeders around like the likes of steve they took over at berry know know that and they use that again personal private gain at the expense of the wider community so that was great so um okay so part part what we're talking about here is we're doing a football but also extrapolating these ideas out because I think with football you can actually see how dodgy the owners of most big business are that often psychopaths that often greedy um co-op with the movement to bring things up for the grassroots or something I've always really believed in and really loved and things so and you're working a lot different areas with the co-op thing so he got the carbon co-op manager a co-op commission and also carbon co-op here I think yeah oh yeah and beyond the music as well and the music institute as well so we've got about 10 minutes if you can just sort of explain what your connection and what the ideas behind those are yeah I mean these are obviously all different parts of the great Manchester world that matter hugely to people we talked about care today we talked about football we talked about music the big challenge of of people's homes making them affordable warm you know is is a massive challenge as we rise the climate challenge and I think the co-op movement has a big role there that you know the cost of living crisis actually big a big a big role and the other carbon co-op are brilliant actually the thing I would say to everybody um with regard to how we move from the kind of the models we've lived under because you go through all of these things football music care the common denominator is the mantra that the market solves everything has been comprehensively disproved by the last 30 years in all of those sectors it's left us with a nightmare isn't it you know where we haven't got these things that matters so much to us in a place where they're secure and so therefore you know tackling the status quo this session is it I think we have to really start to sort of talk about I can entirely new sort of approach to things devolution of power out of Westminster empowers the co-operative movement I think everyone really needs to get behind this notion because it is about then power flowing the other way than way it's traditionally flown in this country where Westminster subject to the lobbying of big business privatisation deregulation that's what that system has delivered isn't it and it has on the ground it's caused chaos it's caused a situation where homes are not safe for people the cladding crisis killed people Grenfell five years this week it's created a situation where buses are unaffordable to people you've got a deregulated bus system and I think this is the change that we now need we need to kind of absolutely rule out this notion that the market solves everything it doesn't we've ended up with a derby county economy we are a derby county economy all respect to Elaine but yeah that's not a great great statement right now but devolving not just to the regions but devolving to the people devolving to the people in this room getting to go to make things work that's the point I mean you know it's to be proven yet whether this thing we're announcing today will work but I am trying to get some of the devolve power I have behind Oldham Athletic that's that's what we're trying to do not to take over what we're not to tell them what to do but then just to stand behind them that's the point of what devolve power and funding can can do and I have come to the view that we need well we need just wholesale change don't we in terms of the way these things are being done energy will be another one wouldn't it you know put energy systems in the hands of local people so that they can protect themselves from the you know the profiteering that that goes on and the kind of the the anxiety that's caused by rising energy prices these are the things that we need to we need to do going forward and you know the co-op movement obviously has what we can often say its time has come but I think it post pandemic its time has really really come and we can't sit back and wait you've got to shake the future now ourselves and I would say that the mayor will combine authorities and the co-operative community in every area is a potent combination if we can get them absolutely aligned and pushing in the same direction for me it's a 19th century just revolution idea that makes more sense in the 21st century this is a time for the co-op movement you know yeah I but let's just be honest though I think I am talking about wholesale political reform because the country is hardwired to favour vested interests against the wider public interest and that is my experience of 16 years in Westminster you concentrate power in a small number of hands in Westminster you create the opportunity for the media to manipulate that power in the interests of big vested vested interest the status quo that's that and this is what this session is about so I think we need to rewire the country basically if you're to get power out of there and into the hands of people who are able then to protect what matters to them to support people with their homes and their energy bills so I mean I am some ways a bit of a late convert to this but I am now fully in favour of proportional representation for the for the commons I think the Lord should become a senate of the nations and regions and out of that reformed parliament I think you have to have maximum devolution of power to all parts of the country and resources so that communities can rebuild their own their own worlds their own places you know why do we put up anymore with anonymous care companies extracting money out of care commissioning as we were hearing before and leaving vulnerable people within our communities without the basic support why are we putting up with that model anymore you know and I think you've got to rewire the country I think to allow a different model to to take shape we're kind of nibbling at it at the moment but I think you've got to take a decisive step to to the powers going to flow differently around the country and the more the power flows out of Westminster and interlocal communities the more you empower supporters trust at the grassroots level or care co-ops or carbon co-ops and I think we're going to hear from the yeah I mean the context of that which retease up very nicely to what the carbon co-ops do I think yeah I think there's a few things there and I think the overall message is how well uh cooperatives can play with the devolved local authorities and give you one example the cost of living crisis at the moment everyone's fuel bills are going through the roof okay fantastic we need to do something about that uh what's the response from government well it's to give tax breaks to oil companies in the North Sea it's to and also deregulation yeah no they were saying let's have a deregulation drive to solve the cost of living crisis yeah well what's the one thing we know that will reduce people's bills forever it's insulating their homes retrofit in their homes and the the uh bays the business secretary the treasury are just silent on it they don't want to say anything about it we can speculate why that is but then we have people like Andy at a local level they were putting it out there and saying no we need to do this we need to retrofit homes it's for the good of the people it builds local supply chains local economies it tackles the environment as well and that and that political leadership is just absolutely absent um at the national scale from Westminster at the moment and as cooperatives working at a local level building these new businesses helping people in their homes we need that we need that kind of leadership because from that flows action from that flows funding and and the right kind of environment and the regulatory environment to do that can't we just do it without them you know let's just do it all grassroots i think that that's one of the messages of cooperatives like we are doing that you know we we carbon copy and going for more than 10 years now and we're doing stuff all over greater Manchester and beyond but to achieve that kind of scale that we know is necessary there are 1.2 million homes in greater Manchester the vast majority of them need some kind of intervention some of them quite quite major really we're never going to achieve that on our own but we can by working with combined authorities by working with other other people are out there working together in you know incorporation so in context of the cooperative movement how how good is that for you know the zero carbon and those kind of futures is to the two tally does it make that your job your work easier in terms of like no in the cooperative movement and i mean is that something that facilitates it makes it easier get some message out people get organised yeah i mean one of the things we know is like the kind of changes we're going to make to our homes and to our communities and energy systems they're going to need quite big changes they're going to be different ways in which we use energy and what have you we need that consent and that legitimacy to make those changes we need the involvement of people in that process i think it is very similar to football clubs it can't be a thing of like we've talked to people we've consulted them and they're happy with it they have to be involved they have to be involved in the ownership and the control of these kind of systems retrofit is something we do a lot of here we're going to go into people's homes we we can make some quite large scale changes it might cost quite a bit of money to do that sort of thing now the households need to trust us they need to think all right yeah i trust these guys to come in and do stuff and the fact that we're not for profit but that we're owned by members and that our members are the people that we're working for that's integral to that and that's why we're doing retrofit at the moment when quite a lot of the the private sector they're not doing anything you know i think this is the thing i was just trying to get over before you know co-ops thrive in a crisis don't they and we're in a national crisis cost of living but climate you know energy there's on old fronts isn't it at the moment you know things are collapsing aren't they things are breaking down in front of us leaving people exposed to costs that they can't afford and you know so we're in a we're in a crisis so that's why i say it's the moment for the cooperative movement because you could solve the crisis by more of the same and the government will try and do that but actually it's the crisis and the climate imperative combined say something fundamentally different is needed than what we've done before because you know we're not going to get the fairness into this actually you've got to kind of think of climate justice social justice one on the same thing if you're going to make homes buildings transport energy systems green it's a chance to change them but to change them in the public benefit not in the again replicating the the issues that we've we've had so you see what i mean i mean this is why this is such a moment actually to to bring through a whole new whole new paradigm really in terms of how we create wealth in communities create good jobs through retrofitting it's about the crisis we're in and the the climate crisis coming and then saying right business as usual is not going to solve either of those things so therefore the new thing comes in and takes its takes its place this is the moment this is the moment i think it's actually even though everything's in a really terrible situation there's actually a positive take from this because we can actually everything sorted out i think so i think i'm going to be saying more about this in the coming days but i think we need a big change of direction for the country now in this in this period that we're in we cannot carry on on the same path of doing the same things and while the government i was in did lots of good things i i i am sad that it kind of continued the sort of deregulation sort of the competitive tendering that we were talking about before and the fragmentation of public services it should and it did many good things and i'm proud of many things it did but actually it kind of carried a direction on that was going through the 80s 90s and i think we've hit a point here where the evidence is absolutely right there in front of us deregulation does not work privatisation of public services does not work if you if you leave the private sector in control of of homes and retrofitting it won't happen at the speed that we need for the for the climate crisis you won't get public transport that people can afford look at the cost of trains you know what people are paid to get here today cost of buses it's not working for people it's it's damaging people's lives so a whole new model is needed and i don't know you know whether that's too ambitious but it feels to me that you know we need to get a kind of new consensus around around this that it can't be more of the same well go on it's well it can't be more that's why i'm putting these ideas out there it can't be more of the same yeah you say yeah well um the government are currently consulting on how we use and manage our energy systems in the future to be more flexible to allow more generation on them and they're saying okay we're going to create a market how do you think our market should be run and the the obvious response is look at the energy supply market it's it's not working you know dozens of companies have gone bust companies that came into the market to make a quick book and found out well they couldn't when things changed and to say and then also to say with energy efficiency energy companies are mandated to spend a portion of the money that they earn on energy efficiency now they've dropped off the cliff that market isn't working those markets aren't working so for the regulators and for the government to say oh what new markets should we come up with it's just fantasy to me like you know i think we're not we're not processed enough yet what we've all lived through in the last two years what we saw laid bare when the tide went out in march 2020 we could see the seabed of this country more clearly than we'd ever seen it before couldn't we and what we saw was millions of people in jobs so insecure that when they were ill they couldn't go home and hence covid took a hold in some of the most well the least affluent parts of our of our country and that and they were going home to homes in the private rented sector that were not fit for human habitation that were damaging to their health that is what it revealed that is where we've got to with the way we've been running things you know that that model of leaving people working hour to hour to try and make things work with no security in their life whatsoever worrying themselves to sleep every night in a home that's beneath the decent home standard because the landlord's under barely any regulatory pressure to to maintain the condition of their property that is the state of things and having no power and the pandemic revealed it and what are we going to do about it and having no power of their lives which i find the co-op thing is great because it empowers people to take responsibility for their own lives takes power off politicians which is great and i fully advocate that having worked with a lot of them over the years Michael thank you and you used to be giving him the death's day when it's time to finish talking just now i was just getting going there could be having this conversation for at least another few hours but you have got lunch now for an hour before we get into the climate and ecology Bill we've got to judge Mcgavin and the cooperative bank we've got sessions with young people we've got markets in the mark we have got a discussion about taking a stake in the cooperative bank and Ian Adelaide Elaine is still around he's doing an fca guidance on community benefit societies and the rules that we need to change to empower and enable this so you've got an hour before you need to be in your next sessions but before we do that can we thank today an incredible conversation from John Robb Andy Bird and Paul Darm and Jonathan and Andy Walsh thank you Andy as well welcome I'm brilliant for those of you in the room and he's still here one of the things the themes that has really come out is about making sure that we are engaged with the people and the matters that people care about and none more so particularly in co-ops all of our members you know we did this research before COP26 and there's another session later specifically about what co-op they're doing but you know that care and concern for the community is up there so it's my absolute pleasure today to welcome to discuss something that's critically important and we all need to get behind which is the climate and ecology bill so we have with us Dr George Mcgavin Dr Amy McDonald we have Deborah Darlington from the cooperative bank we have Barry Clavin from the co-op group and we have Dr Amira Sowers director of programs and research from climate outreach as our moderator over to you Amira thank you thank you so much Rose and thanks everyone for being here and online it's really great to be here at the congress I've personally felt really inspired I wasn't fortunate enough to be able to join yesterday but I was looking through the timetable feeling just super inspired at what is the potential and what co-ops are doing to really drive action in different areas of society I work for an organization called climate outreach and our sort of mission is to create a social mandate on climate action by involving and engaging with people from all walks of life different values and identities and helping them see themselves in the climate story and know how to take action so it's really great to be here today and just to give a brief bio of the fabulous panelists we have first we'll hear from Dr George Mcgavin he's an entomologist zoologist an explorer he's a very accomplished academic and broadcaster having made many programs for BBC TV and radio and the discovery channel which have engaged people on a variety of topics about our natural world and also his own personal journeys he's an honorary research associate at the oxford university museum of natural history and a research associate of the department of zoology of oxford university then we will hear from dr Amy mcdonald who is director of the zero hour campaign zero hour is basically the campaign group behind the climate and ecological emergency bill or CEE bill which we'll be talking about today in in quite a bit of detail and this is the only proposed legislation before the UK parliament that ensures a comprehensive and joined up approach to the emergency which is something that we desperately need so it's it's really important to discuss this and have you here today to dialogue with us about the potential for that Amy has a background in deliberative democracy and has a PhD from the Chelsea College of Arts then we'll hear from Deborah Darlington director of brand marketing and communications at the cooperative bank she's going to be sharing insights on how the bank is engaging with the CEE bill and the climate emergency more broadly and she's been working at the co-op bank for 14 years now so has a real that sort of rich history of insights to share with us about the organization's journey and before that she worked in the fashion industry and finally online diving in today we have Barry Clavin senior ethics and sustainability manager at the co-op group he's also going to be sharing how the group is responding to the climate and ecological emergency bill as well as what what the organization is doing to back the bill and he's been working at the co-op group for quite a long time as well so he has many years of experience to discuss with us and bring to the table today and of course we want to make sure that this is relevant to everybody who's dialing in online so we want to create space for Q&A and discussion a bit later once we've heard from the speakers so if you're online and you want to share a question with us that you'd like to answer please send it a tweet with the hashtag co-op congress and then we'll do our best to pick it up and answer it if not during this session afterwards so we're going to start with having George up at the podium please and I have a sort of question for you which you're you've graciously offered to answer for us today with all your experience so George you've got extensive experience working on ecology and wildlife and you know better than most of the impacts of the climate crisis on our nature and wellbeing can you share with us some of the key insights into the crisis facing us there's a lot of information out there so what do we need to know yes thank you my my job today is to scare the bejesus out of you that that was what I was told to do um this picture on the screen here I want you to just take 30 seconds to look at it and appreciate that this picture was taken in 1968 December the 24th 1968 by Bill Anders who is an astronaut on Apollo 8 this is Earthrise so Apollo 8 is orbiting around the moon and this is Earthrise as it appears to the astronauts this should have been an absolute game changer for us as a species because this little blue dot this little blue marble is basically what we've got there's nothing else and I don't think many people really thought about it at the time they have done now in the time I've been alive we have done the most incredible things we have sent things into orbit to the first one of course as Sputnik we're now sending instruments to look at the furthest reaches of the cosmos I mean and this is 400 years after an Italian guy first raised a lens to his eye and went oh that's time three that that's rather good that's only 415 years ago and we have got the first integrated ship there at the top we've we've got smallpox off the off the map that's that's gone atom bomb of course we've worked out that the code of life we can even make new life forms that have never existed before we have searched happily without success for any extra terrestrial individuals who I'm sure might not be terribly eager to share with us first heart operation we've worked out where we came from our first direct and ancestor and we've of course been on the moon all of that in a very short time now this is a graph of how many humans there are on earth I was born in 1954 there were 2.4 billion of us on earth and in the time that I've been taking breath it has gone up to just about 8 billion 8 000 million individuals now that is a lot of individuals and this actually you you have to bear this in mind when you see the next few slides which of course explains why the problem is why we have a serious issue on our hands and also in the 50s in 1972 when I was doing my second year in my degree at Edinburgh this slim volume hit the bookshelves and began to undermine what we thought of our what we could do in the world and it basically said it was written by some very bright MIT grad students in a very clear dispassionate way and it basically said you can't go on business as usual cannot go on forever and they reasoned it and they argued very clearly and they predicted that a business as usual scenario would lead to environmental and economic collapse sometime in the mid 21st century well how prescient were these kids 70 1972 exactly 50 years ago and so I'm afraid it has come to pass habitat loss rife wilderness areas are now reduced seriously around the world pollution the amount of plastics which when I was born never existed we never had plastics in 1954 it's now 350 billion metric tons of plastic produced a year that's equal to the population of humans every single year that's now a massive issue invasive organisms we take things around with us from A to B by accident or design they cause a problem and of course over over exploitation in the seas particularly all of these immature sharks here are immature of an endangered species that is protected not protected and of course over that looming over the whole thing now is the specter of climate change we are getting warmer of that there is no doubt nobody nobody now thinks that it's an artifact nobody thinks it's caused by anything else other than anthropogenic effects and this is the areas the world which are between one two or up to four degrees hotter than they wear on average and you can see that's pretty much the whole of the globe this is an easier way of showing it this was the brilliant Edward Hawkins who devised this stripe effect so you could see you'd visualize immediately just how things are going 54 back here fantastic no problems and then suddenly I spent my whole adult career not studying animals and plants and thinking how wonderful they are but worrying being in a state of eco anxiousness for the whole of my adult life and the reason of course is very easy to see if you go back far off in history and you look at what's happened you find that as the human population increases the number of extinctions increases almost in step and it's happened everywhere and at every time some people think there was a time of man's history of human history when we lived in harmony with the world it's an illusion simply we were able to live in relative harmony because there were so few of us our impact was minimal and it has always been that and now there are so many of us our impact is huge plantations of palm oil and soya bean around the world are devastating the most complex and biodiverse habitats the world has ever seen simply to put in face creams and crisps and that sort of thing and soya bean shipped from brazil to feed beef cattle that we to feed our insatiable appetite for beef it's a disaster and the loss of this one habitat which now covers only six percent of the land surface area reduced from a historical 12 percent is the biggest immediate threat to global biodiversity and yet banks around the world are funding it every year the last year before 2.6 trillion us dollars was lent to projects and corporations to use specifically in destruction of habitat and it's when are we going to realise when our governments when are our governments going to realise that without the earth's natural you know capital which we need we simply will not be able to survive well we've had reports after reports my goodness that's the easy thing to do listen guys there's a problem okay we need a report let's get a report let's get lots of reports every single report says the same thing that does goop to report fantastic report written by hundreds of economists and biologists and everybody that ipbs assessment all say the same thing it's going the wrong way we have lost connection with the natural world we take far too much from the natural world the natural world cannot cope with the demands we place on it and people are getting mad people are getting angry young individuals particularly because they see where it's going they are taught at universities and colleges and they're angry with us at rightly so why did you allow this to happen well if we just sort of wandered into it blindly I suppose I don't know but they are angry and with good reason well this is the biodiversity issue in a nutshell the black thing lying there it's going down down down and we have a choice we can go on business as usual in which case it will continue to sink and sink and sink we can do a little bit of about it a little bit we can do a bit more of conservation work we might flatten it out a bit but what we want to do is to pull it back up and we know what to do we know exactly what we should be doing it seems we just aren't able to there are two words two phrases that make me go apoplectic and this is them this is the two sustainable growth which of course is an absurdity you cannot have sustainable growth you can be sustainable or you can grow you cannot do both any degree of growth with a pot of finite resources is ultimately unsustainable and the other one is save the planet the planet I would remind everybody is absolutely fine it's been here for five billion years it will continue for another five billion years until the sun an average g2 star sucks it up and swallows it but it's doing fine it what's not doing fine is us what we should be thinking about is not this we should get into everybody's head now that it's not about this it's how are we going to save ourselves that is the key point is this where we're heading I think it is like currently this is a farmer in China how are we doing for time this is a farmer in China who grows you know fruit trees there are no bees left no bees left in this area because of pollution because of pesticides she has to pollinate every single flower with a little brush on a stick is that where we're heading this is the jungles in South America this is a rainforest fragment in a sea of soybean is that where we're heading is that what we want is england a green and you know a pleasant land which we we all imagine it is no it's not it's placed in the lowest 12 percent of countries in the world whose ecosystems and biodiversity is intact that's a scary fact i grew up thinking england and scotland and uk was a beautiful place it's not it's wrecked but we can change it we can change it and that is why i support the climate and ecology bill the only chance we've got and the only piece of legislation which proposed legislation which might ensure that the uk parliament thinks about climate and ecology in a joined that way this i'm afraid as far as i'm concerned is our only hope thank you very much thank you so much george that was really inspiring but also a bit of a shock i think for many you know where we currently are in terms of the situation where can people go to if they want more information about your work online email me all right over to amy so amy as the director of the zero hour campaign you're galvanizing people and institutions across the country to really sort of push on the government to get this piece of lead it's really inspirational honestly to see how much collective action you're driving and we'd love to know a bit more about what you're up to and how we can get involved sure thank you so much it's great to be here so thanks for inviting us along we're really really privileged to be here um yes so my name is amy i'm from the zero hour campaign calling for the climate and ecology bill so our campaign is running using a mass mobilisation approach so this means that was sort of galvanizing energy across different sectors across political parties and across the uk and this is a model of campaigning it uses a private members bill so it's a proposal for a piece of legislation put forward by mps put forward by peers um that calls for real concrete change um so we're gathering this momentum and we're using a model that's based on the big ass campaign and this campaign in the end led to the climate change act great so we know that it works it works we can win and at the moment where we're at with our campaign is that we have 152 different mps and peers supporting we have um had 200 different councils proposed most motions and support of the bill which is really fantastic and we have around about 25 000 individuals who've signed up many of whom are campaigning actively with us um but always room for more to come on board so do join up we're also working with lots of different organisations you may recognise some of them up here um so we work with um over 450 different organisations some of whom just backed the bill and others who are working more closely with so in the lead up to cop 26 we were working with lush and um toast ales who work on a circular economic model um so we're working very closely with them and since March 2021 we've been working with the cooperative bank um who've been partnering with us on events such as town halls we've come fresh from tewkesbury where we've been pushing on the conservative np at Lawrence Robertson last night so yeah that was very fun we've been working with the bank in lots of ways which i'm sure will be drawn out in this presentation today um radio days handins and all sorts of things so there are many ways to get involved and also actually you know our campaigning is really about getting involved with grassroots movement and constituency action so if you are interested in signing up as an individual or an organisation we've had representatives from companies coming in and directly lobbying MPs with us so do get involved so um i just wanted to take this time as well just to quickly run through the content of the bill so you know a little bit about what it's actually about as George was kindly saying i mean one of the unique aspects of the bill is that it deals with climate and nature together so we know that we can't the two are inextricably interlinked the two sides of the same coin and climate experts say that if we don't have healthy nature then we just won't be able to reach any of our climate targets we know that nature and healthy ecosystems actually lock in and store carbon from the atmosphere and they also help us deal with some of the worst shocks um from climate such as flooding and things like that um so the bill i see is having three main parts the first part has a climate target and a nature target the bill then talks about how to fix um our global impact and thinking about international responsibility and then third part is critically about public engagement so our climate target is to commit to a carbon budget for 1.5 degrees celsius and the government themselves say that if we go over 1.5 then we could lose control of our climate for good which is obviously terrifying and we're actually getting really really close now so this is saying that we must commit to our fair share of the carbon budget the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere to remain at 1.5 and at the moment our pathway gives us about a 50 chance if the whole world were to do the same so that's obviously less than a flip of a coin which is very very scary and we know that the government are still investing in oil and coal projects and that we're on track to miss all of our carbon budgets going forward so they're just not acting in accordance with what they know um we also call for the reversal of the destruction of nature by 2030 so as George was saying it's quite shocking that actually the UK is in the bottom 12% not in Europe but globally for the deprivation of nature and current legislation the environment bill asks for us to halt biodiversity loss at 2030 but obviously if we halt where we are now then that's really terrible and actually we need to see that we're on this pathway up to recovery great so the second section of the bill international responsibility so we think about this in two ways again thinking about climate and nature at the moment we only account for our um the emissions that happen on UK soil but we all know that lots of the production of all of the stuff that we consume you know we have production and transportation and the disposal of all of these goods that happen all the way around the world and we need to make sure that we account for this by accounting for our import emissions we also need to think about our ecological footprint um we need to think about these as the real drivers of climate change and ecological breakdown um because we could perfectly allow the UK to be wild regenerate it would be beautiful but if at the same time we're consuming in the way we are and that we're destroying key ecosystems for example like the amazon rainforest then all that would be for nothing and the third part is about involving the public so we're calling for a nature and climate assembly so this would bring together a representative group of individuals from around the UK so it could be some of you in the audience would be working with experts with government bodies as well to draw up an emergency strategy to try and find a fair way forward so this is really important not only because it acts as almost like a huge education project of actually what is required what are the decisions lifestyle choices that we need to make to remain within these safe bounds um or to give us the best chance of 1.5 in the reversal of nature by 2030 but also of course critically um if the public are involved if we're involved it gives legitimacy to politicians to go further and faster yeah and i'll leave it at that for now do join us in this website zerohour.uk Thanks. Thank you so much Amy. Just be careful if there's a little ledge there thank you so much can we please have Barry up on the screen so we're going to have a bit of a discussion now and then we're going to open it up to questions um firstly Deborah can you share with us a bit about the cooperative banks journey i mean there's lots of initiatives out there on climate change and you know ecological action but what was it about this particular initiative that inspired you to become a key partner? Well thanks for the question and thanks George and Amy passionate presentations as always um well it's an exciting period for us as a bank as well so it's fantastic timing to be joining up with supporting the bill and obviously with zero hour that we um this year we actually celebrate our 30th anniversary of our customer-led ethical policy which is underpins the bank as approach to to what we do and what we stand for and how we operate as a bank um and it actually this week we've launched our refreshed six iteration of that policy running a really you know quite extensive consultation with our customers which almost 50 000 responded and took part in that which has obviously led to the development of the poll and over those 30 years of the poll and actually more so than ever in the most recent um customers have conscored power that led us to what's happening in consumers minds as well and you know 60% of the UK population said despite you know the challenging economic climate that's rising the cost of living the environment and is still top of mind and still a really pressing issue and actually many would pay a little bit more to have more sustainable energy and sources to be able to support that so we know there's challenges for all consumers and our customers but it's still right up there and I think what's really interesting is some of the lower um you know uh where you would expect those that are most tightly hit to be maybe having to balance their decisions so one's the most vehemently saying you know please don't ignore this issue because that's the last thing that we want to do because we want to think about the future but as a bank you know you know the the work the guys are doing and also the work that we've done through the policy reiterates from the decisions we've made on our journeys of bank over those years you know in 1998 we made the decision to stop banking businesses involved in the extraction and production of fossil fuels um and as you know we've always been a campaigning bank it's the hard you know the bedrock of who we are and why we exist and in 2006 we stood alongside Friends of the Earth um in campaigning for the Climate Change Act which it actually became law two years later in 2008 and over the fact last 30 years we've worked hard to become a really sustainable business and we've become carbon neutral for well over a decade so we're thrilled with some of those you know but we know there's more to do um more recently we've recognised as an urgent need to do more and it's clear that the collective responsibility to tackle the climate nature crisis is for all of us for banks for businesses for government and for consumers of course you know but it's about how we consume as you know George Riley said it's what we do how we act as individuals not just behind a business that will really make a difference and bring change into the world and that's why we're proud to partner with and and be an ambassador of the climate and ecology bill who were actually brought to our attention by our customers so it was them that actually um um responded to us and and you know brought brought to the fore that they wanted us to work and and to be the voice of this campaign so from the top down you know our CEO is absolutely passionate and has lobbied government to uh to challenge and to respond and to make a difference and and that to get behind this bill because we really have no choice and you know it's evident that we need legislation to address the damage that's been done and so we are urging all our customers all our stakeholders our colleagues all our partners to to really work with us and join us in back in the bill and there's a lot more that can do we you know we had the great kick off with the Tanol event yesterday with Amy um working together there and it's starting to really galvanize response because as you said you know I think it consumers are really really really worried about this thank you so much I mean it's so interesting isn't it you've really been pioneering and sort of leading even ahead of the government on net zero for example and you know we have these targets as a country we you know we have to reach net zero but I think 62 percent of the target actually requires some form of individual action or engagement so that means everybody in society needs to be able to take action and having businesses and institutions and co-ops work with the individuals and stakeholders that you engage with is going to be absolutely critical to making that happen um so just handing over to Barry now thanks for joining us online Barry um can you tell us a bit about the cooperative groups approach coming through okay yes thanks great I mean I probably not start so much about the cooperative groups approach but I think just reflecting on some of the things I've heard there in those great presentations which is I think it's easy for us to sometimes forget how much power and influence we do have as a movement um there are not very many businesses out there that would have done the things that we've done in terms of engaging with individuals mobilizing individuals uh to participate in democracy effectively is why I think we're all that so what was described by Amy and and Deborah there about the big ask in the climate change act I mean I was around when we did that and I'm sure lots of other people in the room around where we we have we we have got charges trains and charges coaches and some of the mobilized people we've got people are training thousands of businesses out to the Parliament we've walked alongside the members of the top staff we've walked alongside the members of the friends of yours is going to be not many businesses in the future I'm not many of those those United Nations with one corporate so long time and marching on Parliament looking for system and change not just self-deficitly, pridefully driven, motivated change so we count on half of brilliant things and that's what this is all about again which is we really want a quick genuine of what is going to change for the good for everyone for the long term permanently then this is the way we're going to have to do it I can do lots of things in my business I can tweak products I can tweak sidechains I can do this and that and it will make a difference and it is the right thing to do and I will continue to do it but we need to change things by a sensible progressive regulation that raises the bar for everyone in societies more broadly so that's why we're really behind this bill it's the right thing to do frankly we need to do more of it and if I was going to state something that may not be a popular thing to say in the room it's just my slight frustration is as much as young people care about these things they still don't get involved in the democratic processes as much as I would really like them to you know the proportion of young people voting is still you know it's the lowest age group of all the of all the ages we need to mobilise people we need to young people we need to get into a reflect and understand the power that they've got to change things not just about where you're going not just where you decide to shop not just which other cult you decide to trade with change things properly effectively and for the long term through your democratic power and that's what excites me about this type of initiative which is why we the cult movement are so good at this and we do it right even if dare I say sometimes there may be some pain involved not all of this comes free if this legislation comes in the same with the climate change act there was pain involved we did have to adjust our business to change things but change them for the right reasons for the long term and I'll just pause at that and because I know you're very keen to get conversations going in the room then thanks so much the question of young people is really interesting because we you know climate outreach does research with all sorts of different people and we've just done a survey of I think 6,000 young people across six countries in Europe including in the UK and he's absolutely right that there's a very high appetite just to see change for systemic change in particular to happen but there's also a high sense of powerlessness amongst young people and that isn't just young people that's across the population you know there's certain communities that have been sort of pushed to the side a little bit because they're not necessarily seen as progressive but actually they show very high concerns for nature in particular and could be a great sort of community segment audience to work with and journey so that they can see themselves in the story of climate change they know how to take action but we sort of need to understand our audience a bit better and start communicating a bit more effectively overall as the climate movement but staying with the role of co-op specifically sort of question first maybe for Barry and Deborah but if others have thoughts what can people in this sort of co-ops co-operative movement what can they do or how can they engage with some of the initiatives that you've mentioned already? I mean I'd start off by saying just really get involved you know where we've taken a starting point is to work with the teams but to really start to galvanise politicians to you know really try and raise the profile to MPs work with our customers to do the same and to become that voice and to activate our customers who we know are really passionate obviously about climate but also have a real voice and a point of view so we're trying to advocate them through things like the town halls but really using it through all our communications to our customers because I do think as co-operatives whose fundamental role is to improve society and to have a fairer more equal society then I think it's a unique position for the co-operatives to to be at the forefront of this change so yeah I think for me it's really about getting involved and I'd say you know if anyone wants more information obviously Amy and George but we you know we can help too we can help with materials that we've been producing and working on and you know we can point people in the right direction or whatever so more than happy to help him anyway yeah I could just lead you on from that I think that there are obviously really clear crossovers between the co-operative movement the environment movement and our campaign of course at zero hour so whether it's about you know being really values led also really seeking transformational change and thinking about models that put people on planet first and also we know of course that in the co-operative movement it's being really um integral to things like transforming the food sector and transitioning to renewable energy as well so we're also working away from these different angles um and so yeah as well we've just really urge you to get involved education education who said that but in in many ways he's right he was right we need education and we need it at all levels kids at school are very worried I go out to schools regularly and when they become eligible to vote I'm sure they will be doing so change is happening it is happening it's just glacially slow in comparison to what it needs to be this is a disaster that has been a long time coming it was 100 years ago when a Swedish guy said uh you can't go putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it's gonna cause an imbalance it's gonna warm the earth and everybody thought he was mad of course and now so it has come to pass of course so there's a lot that everybody can do we need to get nature and the natural world the supportive environment on which we all depend into our heads everything we do everything we think about we've become so divorced particularly in the UK and other western countries but become divorced from the natural world totally divorced we don't think about it we need to think about it all the time every day if I do this what effects that gonna have if my my council streams the verges and lying of fosates the drabias what effect is that gonna have if this church has on its lights every night of the summer attracting bats to death and everything else what effect is that gonna have what effect is that extra car journey gonna have we need to think about it individually and that's why education is is so important there will always be people who do not give a flying whatever uh we might not reach them we might not ever reach them but if we can get the majority so it becomes almost nobody would go into a restaurant now and have a fag it would be disgraceful and that's the point we want to get to thanks any thoughts additional thoughts barry I just reflect on that as well which is that I think sometimes people can feel maybe I'm talking a little bit about young people again here which is you can feel disempowered because you feel that your influence is associated with your economic influence um whereas you know your democratic influence is the same for everybody and that's what we just need to re-enthuse I think first I really want to re-enthuse uh people individuals in terms of the opportunity the great opportunity that exists by having your say and I think that again that's why courts the opposition you know at our agms traditionally uh no it's not the case now but traditionally co-ops would have the most sort of ethical and sustainable uh sustainability based motions raised at their agms it was a really light thing it got talked about all the time now most plcs get them raised but probably not in the same sort of way they get them raised because it's usually a negative thing to try and stop and do things as opposed to what you get with co-op agms is a really positive do more at the vex I just I just think that if collectively we can just re-enthuse people about the opportunity that's there to influence via their democratic vote their democratic impact as co-ops in broader civil society generally I think that would really help but then I also go back to you know what we're hearing here which is you know we're a business that's been around for 180 years and we've built ourselves basically on fossil fuels for 180 years I we have now got 18 years to reverse that because we've got commitment to get to net zero by 2040 effectively that means we take all fossil fuels out of our business in 18 years the scale of that and the speed with which we need to respond to that is mind-blowing but durable and has to be done yeah but we need that passion and drive from our members to continue to help us to push forward on this agenda thank you so much and we know from evidence actually that one of the best ways to encourage people to have agency on climate change is just starting with talking about it so talking about it in your at home over the dinner table with your friends at work is is it's a way that kind of unlocks a sense of agency and by starting to do little things in your work in your home with your friends with your family you become a trusted messenger on climate action and people around you start to feel more confident and we see this domino effect so we can all do it and it can be in our own way whether that's through our work or whether that's through at home and we're all you know it may not feel like we're having a macro impact but actually we are but I'm quite keen to open it up to questions now we've got about 15 minutes so um we haven't had any coming online so just to remind people online if you tweet with the hashtag co-op congress then we'll try and pick that up do we have anyone in the room oh we've got a couple of hands so I see three hands let's take three questions lady with the black top here first then the lady and the gentleman on the front table I'm Evelyn Godfair I'm one of the directors of mid counties co-op and I'm glad you mentioned voting there because it's so I'm also active in the co-op priority and stand regularly in local elections and the green issues are very big in in all the local government campaigning now so people are all aware of the issue and everybody seems to think that they need to put the the green things in their leaflets and and so on and yet the turnout at local elections is typically um 33 34 35 percent and it's just absolutely um depressing to see people not engaging um in in the democratic process but what I've noticed and then general elections maybe 65 70 percent is considered a you know a good turnout but that's still pretty abysmal um but what I've noticed from Extinction Rebellion is that they've been talking about people's assemblies and now you mentioned a climate assembly and it seems like an alternative way to engage people in politics but I'm wondering if that is is also not helping them engage in normal politics and and go out and vote so could you maybe be doing more alongside those that idea of people's assemblies and climate assemblies really getting the message true to people that they do have to engage in normal um you know traditional politics as well and vote and and and use their vote thank you let's take the other two questions and then we'll get the panel to address the ones that they can so the lady and the gentleman on the front table here please and then there was we'll take we'll take the next round after this one thanks thank you good afternoon everyone um first of all do you think so this climate change is a man made if so how we can tackle and how we can give platform everyone across the world to train them and and the second thing um I was in growing up nowhere I came to as a young age why is it not good idea to pick up in the Norway system to exchange bottles and plastic the cash when you buy drink is all the plastic you put your house and then you go closest the shop to put it and take a cash to buy whatever you need and how we can train the world for example I come from I came back from Somaliland recently and the east Africa as you're all aware of it at the road is keep coming back especially Somalia and Somaliland and the people was destroying the trees to use a charcoal to sell the world and how we can train them and to stop that because the long-term civil war they have no resisting government is and they are not dealing with and not only Somalia and Yemen everywhere so yes we're talking about all the time every one of us knows but how we can train them the school is as you mentioned special subjects and you say education it's indication it's important to tell everyone even if the people in back to home if they know what they're doing it's destroying and it's causing a lot of problems so how we can do together and encourage and give the platform the community thank you and then just a gentleman you've got a mic thanks is that on can you yeah there we are hi my name is glenn I come from an organisation called compass and we're a co-op development agency from Wales and it's our 40th anniversary this year and you're right we've got to have a new economic settlement for this to to work George we've got to move from that growth model to a sort of a well-being model and in Wales we're relatively lucky that we have some politicians who understand that and you know when a climate emergency is declared they make the decision to stop road building any road building in Wales so we've got little start happening but my question is because we know we have to do lots more we need to stop seeing all these concrete going up in city centres when we come up to the stations for example but how are we going to bring people with us when we have the emergency the climate emergency but also the cost of living crisis and we need to convince people who are really struggling at the moment in terms of just to get by on a daily basis that change is needed and necessary and we can have a new economic settlement that will look after people through this process because if we can't bring people along on this journey we're not going to achieve what we want to do so the cost of living crisis bringing people who are really struggling along with us how can we do that thank you thank you so much thanks for the broad range of questions there um there's a lot to cover there um so let's discuss is voting is is the sort of political system and creating a political mandate can we do more to facilitate that to happen and that's an open question to anyone who would like to speak oh yeah i'd like to see before anybody else starts thank you for three of the most difficult questions i mean it's like if i had the answers i would be head of the world bank world health organisation a few other major groups as well i don't know what the answers are as a biologist i'm an observer of the historical and the current situation that we face and it is enormous it is enormous a lot of people governments don't realize how big it is they just i wish there was an asteroid hurtling we could see it we could go oh there's the asteroid uh you know don't look up brilliant film actually absolutely tremendous if you haven't seen it watch it but there it is we can do something about it or not but this is it's sort of it's gradual year on year things get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and the only answer i can hear from governments is you know let's build a way out of it let's get the economy fired up let's have more consumers to buy shit they don't actually need you know i mean it's it's pointless it's actually pointless so we need a whole different way as every reporter has highlighted of measuring our success a different way of doing it not GDP not not you know how much cash have we got in the bank you know when the world is burning your money ain't gonna help you one whit as my granny used to say there's no pockets in a shroud you know so we need a whole different way and it's this system has been in place for such a long time it's going to take it's like a super tanker just you know going on it's going to the brakes are on but nothing much is happening you know but we need the governments that people we elect to do what they're supposed to be doing to to look after us and if they can't see this disaster coming then they shouldn't really be in power but i mean you know the problem that we have in the uk you know first pass the post and all that stuff and so we mean if you get only 30% of the vote you're still in power you know i it's absurd sorry i think Amy did you have some thoughts on how to get people yeah engage on yeah just sort of going back to the the climate and nature assembly that's in the bill and sort of think about this in relationship to to voting and getting people engaged in the democratic system so you know these types of assemblies these types of deliberative democratic processes have been around for quite a while now there's recently been a climate assembly which was set up by six select committees also in islands there have been really successful citizens assemblies that have led to all sorts of changes in legislation and really key bits of legislation in France as well they had a climate assembly where there were actually legislators in the room sort of transforming people's ideas directly into policy and into into law so that was a very exciting moment as well so it's about actually using these processes and embedding them into our current system not sort of to do away with our current system and there are also quite interesting examples in Belgium also in cities in in Poland where they have embedded regular citizens assemblies as well and it's all about feeling that you have agency to really engage in the system and to understand you know all these balances and trade-offs that we have to make and I think for for climate and the environment it's particularly important because we will need to see lifestyle changes and we are going to have to change the way we live so you don't want this kind of you know the yellow vest effect in France do you need people to actually be involved and be part of that process and to make it there thank you and on the topic of education just it's been announced fairly recently there is going to be a GCSE which is on environmental and climate education launched in the UK so that's something it's not everything and you know as george was speaking earlier about don't look up this movie about the what is it meteor coming towards uh uh entertainment is going to be important as well because it's such a big part of our everyday life this crisis we should be able to see it reflected in the things that we spend our time engaging with whether that's through sports whether that's through movies and I think don't look up was actually I heard from at some point at netflix it was the most watched film internationally on all of their platforms so that tells you that there's an appetite for engaging with top you know entertainment education about climate change um on some of the sort of other questions that came up I'm just picking my notes up here so one of them was how to give a platform to everyone and I just wondered if Barry or Deborah had thoughts about do you have initiatives or do you have ambitions for initiatives to work with your employees to help them take action through work but also outside of work if I just go back sorry just to to build on what you were saying there about education and things I mean part of the challenge I've always thought that we've had is that there's been a real lack of science knowledge in business so you have this real separation which is business people of business people and scientists are scientists and of course there is overlaps in some areas where it matters but my view is that the one of the only ways that we're going to address this going forward is that you need much more scientific literacy in business right across the piece so it doesn't matter whether you work in marketing or finance or accounting my view is that our accountants at the account financial accountants need to be carbon accountants and if they're not carbon accountants how are we actually going to respond to this and therefore you have to go down their level again which is where all these skills are going to come from so I'm really keen we're really keen that green skills as well as being in the energy sector in the automotive sector in manufacturing we need green skills everywhere you know it needs to be part of your repertoire as a person entering the work place going forward which is we all have a certain level of scientific literacy whether it's on climate or biodiversity or whatever it may be to be more effective in the new way that businesses are going to have to work in the future because if you recruit accountants and sorry it's only accountants in the room you're going to get what you pay for you know we need a whole new dynamic in terms of the skill sets that we all bring to the decisions that we all make and therefore we'll try potentially we'll get much more more informed well rounded well reasoned decisions where it comes to well if I'm going to construct a new anchor a new shop or whatever it may be I'm not just thinking a bit from traditional commercial perspectives I'm thinking it from environmental social perspectives as well but that's going to take a long time and the challenges we keep saying is we don't work out the time necessarily for all these things to flow through the system and get us to where we need to get to we're gonna start doing things now as imperfect as it may be because we just don't have the time to wait yeah well what percentage of parliamentarians Barry have any science background at all very few I don't know but I imagine this can be low I think it's less than 4% so I mean right from the top down just so we need to add up the beans but we need to know what the beans are that's the problem yeah exactly what's the impact of the beans that's one thing I just add to that as well when you're thinking about accounting for or thinking of the sort of impacts on the business or on the organisation one thing that isn't really being done is thinking about the potential impacts on the employees so impacts are happening everywhere now including here and I was working recently with a big global business who were saying you know when they're wildfires and the floods happened in Australia we had no preparedness for that whatsoever for what was going to happen to our own staff so that's something we need to think about um do you have any thoughts I just wanted to and just as a point I think absolutely everything everybody said I completely agree with I think it's about making it part of our everyday dialogue how we live our lives how we trade off decisions that we make as consumers as businesses or whichever but I actually think another big thing we could ask of everybody is to just lift the lid of the the consumables that you do buy or engage with because if you look beneath you know not always what you read or what is on packaging is what what is actually happening and one of my biggest worries with everything that's going on and where we need to get to to get to become you know net zero and we're not you know we've got a long way to go as a bank we're just starting off this journey in some ways you know and as Barry Riley said you know we need to have carbon accountants we need to understand how we offset decisions that we make but my biggest worry is mass greenwashing for those with power and big budgets and that can then you know greenwash things the positive things that do happen so I think it's up to movements like the cooperative movement to be the advocates of you know look under the bonnet you know scratch the the label you know and really really ask and probe those questions to to get organisations and businesses to be able to substantiate in evidence the things that they're saying thanks okay we've only got a few minutes left so I'm conscious we had somebody else who had their hand up over in this area was there a lady who had her hand up before no yes there okay this gentleman here he has a question we'll take one final question thank you thank you um it was about green skills so if if there were green skills academies around the country who's who would be as it were this the sector skills council that maintains sort of the standards and all of those green skills thank you i mean my head would go to the department of education initially and they do have we're just speaking to them this week actually like you know international climate change advisors basically and they have a whole programme but whether they've actually thought about the regulation is a very good question anyone else on the panel have any thoughts on that or who do you think it should be well universities universities at my whole career in universities wish you do something useful yeah and maybe there's a way you know to you know incentivise people by giving them proper recognition of the training that they do by enrolling in universities or having opportunities to do that all right we're coming to the very sorry go ahead one last point on that it's just that whenever anybody sends in a CV for a job it's not strictly in an environment or such an area these sorts of things are always added on the personal interests as in the nice to do it's nice to have a social confidence it's nice to do environmental good but they're not core to the CV of the industry i think somehow that's got a flip which is these shouldn't just be nice to do they should be core to the types of people we need in business sorry I just wanted to talk about that again I agree with that and I you know I come from the sort of development sector and I worked a lot in feminist organisations and they started asking questions in the interviews about you know what does that mean to you as a person and that doesn't mean that there's a perfect answer but it means that the people who are applying are applying because they're conscious about the values of the organisation and they want to further them and one thing I also heard which is useful is I believe Ikea like one of the main reasons why people apply to work at Ikea is to do with their sustainability portfolio so there is a way to sort of entice people around that you know it can be a very attractive proposition for people nowadays when they're applying for new roles all right come to the very final bit but I do want to ask each of the panellists if they've got one priority piece of advice question piece of advice or question to the audience or to everybody listening on this topic what would it be get involved take part have a voice yeah it would be to please sign up to the campaign obviously but also do write to your MP and I think it can feel and I know everyone's got very different MPs and different relationships with them but it can feel sometimes like you're just hitting against a blank blank wall and I know often you get these answers back that are very manicured and that the MP hasn't even written themselves but the case really is that they don't support until they do so it really is really important to keep keep knocking away and yeah we urge you to write to your MP yeah I don't have anything except one last image guys on the AV if I could have my very last slide which I missed of my talk because I was aware of the time yeah and again hit it again and press advance know what they are take that home as a little thought yeah so that's the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres he's got very very vocal recently out of frustrate clear frustration that he has that governments aren't taking action you know when there's you know very very clear urgent agenda here so yeah thank you and if we if it's possible to jump back on to Barry just to get his final sorry it's the way I can see you here I don't mind getting shot by uh by another individual um no uh look get behind the bill get your MP behind the bill mobilize we need it it needs to happen it needs to happen quickly time is not on our side do it do it now thank you and just to take the space even though I'm not really supposed to I would say just please don't assume that people are not interested in this just because they might come from a different political background you know different social identity because we know from evidence that over I think 80% of the country are highly concerned and want to take action so we need to have conversations which are not necessarily focused on you know our differences but more focused on how we can unify to take action together so thank you so much to everyone for joining us today and I think Rose is going to close us off like hello and if you want to find out about what you can actually do as a co-op and what co-ops to do with climate change you've got 50 minutes break turnaround or you can be attending our federal session or the consultation on Holly Oak House before we all finally come back in here for the really die hard cooperators who've made it through the two days to talk about the cooperative identities we've got a 15 minute break before the final session but importantly that was phenomenally important thank you so much to our wonderful panel thanks Barry to see some people still here I'm just saying like if it's a gig we'd make you all move down to the front so we can get a little bit of a vibe going but everyone looks a bit tired now looks like no one's going to be going anywhere look somebody's come down the front so uh yeah so uh so this panel is again on the green themes and what we could do in different sort of aspects of the co-op community what people are doing what people should be doing what people could be doing uh about the green and eco changes that definitely need to be made as brillantly underlined in the last panel so uh I'll get the panel to introduce themselves starting at that end yeah I'm Jonathan Atkinson I'm one of the co-founders of Carbon Co-op we're based in Greater Manchester and we help people in communities make the kind of large scale reductions in their energy that we know are needed to tackle climate change and we do variety of different things we're very much into retrofit and energy efficiency and we've even spun off a new organisation people-powered retrofit to kind of scale that work we also do energy systems things get involved in electric vehicle charges in the home heat pumps that sort of thing and we're also doing uh increasing amount around advocacy uh which is giving citizens and communities a voice in the energy transition so they're heard their priorities are heard and it's not just kind of technocrats and government making decisions on our behalf so yeah it's us all right thank you uh yeah hi I'm Makeda Cryer and I work for Unity which is a joint venture between Mid County's Co-op and Octopus Energy and the self-focus of Unity is very much community energy what can we do in the community energy space how can we support and so kind of the the bread and butter of Unity is working with community energy groups across the country we work with about 200 now and we purchase the power that they produce via wind solar hydro and the great thing is that energy is the angle of ring rents and then put into a domestic tariff called energy and it's the co-op energy community power tariff so if you're a domestic consumer at home what can I do to support community energy renewables one easy way is to go to the co-op energy community power tariff so that's the kind of core bit of what we do and then beyond that it's trying to innovate the sector trying to get young people involved looking at challenges across the sector and what can we do within Mid County's and with our partner Octopus so you really try and kind of encourage that sector to grow because I think we all agreed especially after the last section that we desperately need change and we need more renewables and we need action quick so any of these challenges that we can make a small part in we're really trying to push forward great Mike yeah hello my name is Mike Pickering I'm head of sustainability at the Mid County's co-operative I'm on the major retail co-operative societies within my role I'm primarily involved in the I'd say the climate action agenda and that is predominantly around reducing the environmental emissions across our operations but also working with our members and communities to take action as well and from the previous session I'm going to start using a phrase of I'm helping us to save ourselves because I quite like that from the last session so that's something I'm doing within my role yeah so I was looking at all the stats I've got my little sheets about this panel and it's you know the percentages of people in the co-op movement to make trying to make the changes so people get towards zero carbon and I know I mean it's all co-ops different aren't there's lots of different types of co-ops doing different things easier for some people to do than others I guess so I mean what was the picture the general picture across the whole co-op movement do you have sort of a handle on it as well yeah so so I'm fortunate enough to be able to chair for the retail consumer coops the environmental sustainability forum we've been it's been in place for just over a year and one of the great things about that group is you get to see certainly across those retail cooperatives the sorts of things that are going on around there and I think the general consensus that comes out from those particular co-ops is for a number of years there's been a real drive to reduce our carbon emissions and certainly reduce our waste and there certainly seems to be an alignment there about this build towards net zero setting science-based targets and I think really importantly working together to share the best practice amongst those co-ops on how we can best do that because we're all on our I'd probably say our individual journeys to an extent we've all got our own expertise and networks but what this forum enables is all that best practice sharing to take place and enable us to come up with those collaborative ideas and I'd say the big thing that comes out as a general theme for co-ops in particular is a lot of businesses now I think we've already mentioned are now starting to take which is great the journey towards reducing carbon emissions net zero that type of thing but what we've got is obviously the members that we work with the local communities that we're in touch with and the key things that often come out of those co-op sharing sessions is how we are working with our members to enable that bigger difference so it's not just our operations it's actually enabling and engaging members in those communities so that's probably the real theme that comes out that's a bit different to maybe other models so what is this forum what is it it's online forum or yeah it's um it is online forum yeah it is online forum it's been in place for just over a year um and it's in place to enable those co-op retail societies to share best practice around environmental sustainability and we look at things like reducing carbon emissions greenhouse gas emissions waste reduction low carbon transport providing low carbon products and services and the main aim of it is so we can share best practice across those retail co-op consumer societies and just as some examples so the mid counties cooperative you know we've shared a lot of insight in our in our one change campaign which I'll talk a bit more about the thing is a session evolves where we've engaged our members in the one change our members can make to take climate action and then ask our members one change they want us to make it's trying to make it simple and actually going back to that last session we had I think the question was raised about a framework that people could use that's our framework our one change mechanism and another a number of the other co-op consumer societies are doing a huge amount as well southern co-op have contributed massively on that form around the net zero journey central england around the um green spaces agenda they've gotten it and enhancing biodiversity and co-op group through their 10 point climate action plan so it's a real good insight sharing on there I mean it's a lot of diverse businesses involved of course in the whole movement and it's going to be a lot easier for some people than others I mean how do you how do you deal how do you communicate to people got very like what's the opposite of zero carbon infinite carbon businesses I mean what how does that work would they be interested in doing this or or is it something so difficult for them to do that you can't I see I think I think that's a really interesting point because I think there are some businesses who are really brought into this agenda and I think are really making strong progress towards this but I think there's others and I'm talking more outside the co-op movement I would say for this that need the push that need the push to really push them in the right direction on on how to go on that journey because it is a very complex and difficult concept for businesses to to embrace you know a bit of business model we've talked a lot earlier about the business as usual model the business as usual model doesn't lend itself naturally to actually making low carbon decisions over profit whereas the co-op business model certainly does do that and mid counties we've got what we call our society steering wheel which is our what we call a balanced scorecard and there's 16 key targets and one of those is reducing greenhouse gas emissions one of those is reducing waste and that is as important as the financial measures as well so I think to help some of those other businesses and organisations on the journey it's trying to share those types of models to bring them bring them along I mean I've you've been working within that framework or do you have your own framework yeah no we absolutely do we kind of form part of the framework I'd say so yeah that that kind of filters right everything every business decision every kind of tiny bit it's kind of step back on what's a sustainability impact and you know the steering wheel but I think being an energy part of a business we kind of naturally then feed into it so I think we then get the the luxury I guess of you know if Mike and the team they need some kind of sustainable innovations and stuff we get to then kind of get to the fun stuff of okay what can we do and so and I think the point you've touched upon about working with other businesses and some that might find it difficult I think for my experience where I've really seen value is where there are obviously co-ops I think a way more reliant and kind of get the challenges and are on the sustainability track and then as we know there's businesses out there that absolutely don't and then there's the the leaders here there's the end of the spectrum like the b-corps and so I think it's kind of I think Scott mentioned earlier about value partnerships with the same like values and ethics and things and I think there's a number of businesses out there that do share those so for instance we've recently done a deal with Patagonia who are really like putting a real charge on community energy and so in essence they've probably done some of the hard work in terms of working with a community energy group um it's called Energy Garden working with ourselves that Energy Garden will produce the energy the community energy we will buy it through unity supply Patagonia but by doing that kind of tri party agreement Patagonia are supporting Energy Garden paying a bit of a social premium on their energy invoice which will be able to help young people make a seller array stack up and what I'm getting at is because of that kind of the people at the forefront driving this sort of change then that's almost then a product that's lifted up and we can say actually okay we've done that now and then if there's a a business in the middle ground who isn't as proactive whatever but then sees that it's like oh okay I can do that and it's not as it's not so hard for them to actually do it because some other companies have really kind of pushed forward and made made the path forward so I think that's where it gets really interesting is okay how can we work with the trailblazers to then make the kind of the naysayers an easier transition for them to do the right thing so again it's the co-ops being cooperative yeah absolutely and it's co-ops being cooperative and working with businesses that share the same ethics and values and then hopefully that together can then you know really kind of use the the middle ground of businesses who probably wouldn't naturally do the right thing or a bit on the fence of okay we could do we could do that it's been done and I think that's a really important part to play I mean what do you see as the key areas general key areas across different businesses that they could be making improvements on yeah I think from our perspective I think well I will speak with an energy hat on so it's kind of it's businesses and consumers it's really kind of I think Deborah said earlier like lifting the lid what what is underneath so question everything it's it's what is challenge every single status quo so I think as a business it would be every kind of procurement aspect it was mentioned earlier by Barry you know carbon tax carbon accountants every everything needs to be questioned and I really feel as well as domestic consumers that is something we all need to do so we're not going to stop using ball bands so could we look for a climate positive ball band that's a plug for car ball band and there's also you know our phones could we do instead of an iPhone could we do a fair phone so I think it's every part of our life that realistically we're not going to change we're still going to use phones we're still going to watch TV but but what can we do to make that small difference and hopefully those increments can add up and really make some change now I like those points I like the idea of question everything I'm an old punk that was something that was part of the ideology but also like this idea that every time you find a solution you do find 10 more problems but not backing off on the problems but embracing the problems and trying to solve them is that something that you get involved in as well yeah absolutely so the community energy space I've worked in community I've worked in energy for over 10 years and the community energy sector I've only known about for the past year which is crazy to me because it's absolutely amazing and once you know about it you're like this is just the future and what what can't you like about it and so I'm in a really fortunate position where we work with about 200 community energy groups at the moment and so we constantly have these chats and it's you know what are the challenges and so one of the challenges we're hearing at the moment for instance is finance so you know we've heard earlier that you know community share raises are successful they really do raise a hell of a lot of money so that's great but that tends to be done at the end of a typical community energy groups project so that's when the solar's halfway through being built or has been built then then they can go out to the community and say hey look what we've got let's do a community share raise and then at the very beginning you've got not so much anymore but you've got grants available for feasibility etc but what do we do about that middle bit and so that middle bit when community energy groups need to put money down to actually buy some solar panels this is a challenge we kept hearing you know we can't get the finance it's too expensive these banks are treating us like you know like big offshore companies that it takes months and months and months and we volunteer led so from hearing that challenge we've launched something called community energy accelerator and it's a 1.5 million pound basically bridging loan so if you're a community energy group and you need finance at that stage it's to offer affordable finance that's accessible at a low rate you have it for six months buy solar panels install your wind turbines do community share raise pay us back and hopefully we can pass it on to the next group and the idea behind that is that I think yeah again walling agreement we need more renewables it's community energy generation has really stored since the subsidies were were stopped and so anything we can do to help that growth is what we're really trying to do yeah i'm just fine just one more thing i'll pick up over there what you're saying is i mean talk about a culture movement i mean the last two days of being here has been very exciting watching a lot of these events and talks it seems very uniquely placed to deal with these problems the culture movement itself in a very forward looking kind of way is that something that you feel being part of it i really do and i really feel as well we know again i think i've been really inspired by some of the talks earlier so i keep referencing but you know the last talk it's talking about kind of eco anxiety and just the real kind of you know we're hearing that young people want to get involved but they don't know how they haven't got the finance to get involved and you know we know it's not just an economic impact it's it's can you volunteer what can you do and so from that another thing that we've launched is um it's called power share and it's you can invest in solar via your energy invoice investing community owned solar via your invoice get returns via your invoice and one part of that and why we've done it is again it's to make community energy and renewable it's just a bit more accessible so if you're not in the green bubble you don't know about it you don't go on these sort of you know platforms like ethics and abundance and know about that sort of stuff it's trying to make people you wouldn't necessarily know about such things being able to invest just by like five panament a bit of a tick box on your invoice and hopefully from that that's going to be enough of an encouragement to say oh okay that's community energy didn't really know that existed didn't know you can invest and hopefully that will lead to them looking at other groups and and doing potentially bigger investments or investing but back to your kind of question in terms of the challenges the big challenge we've seen is young people and their eco anxiety and how can you take practical action and I think from working with community energy groups and you know repowering London and we're here today they do fantastic work with training younger people up and really trying to give them a voice and I think the community energy sector um is naturally the older generation because they've got the time and the many to work with it which is brilliant and without um that generation it wouldn't exist so you know it's but how can we get the younger people involved how can we get that succession knowledge sharing so um with power share we needed an independent community energy group behind that to kind of do the community benefit and all that sort of stuff so as part of that we've helped facilitate the growth of a new community energy group called youth empowered and so youth empowered um is by as the name suggests is to hoping to empower next generation so um and we've got two six formers from the local school on the board of directors we've got um three of the people that are below 30 as directors and the idea behind it is exactly that let's empower let's tell people you know you can get involved you can be directors and just for reassurance there are some older people like myself on the board as well to to help try and steer the path but it's and then we're hoping that's going to have a knock on impact and really trying to give people kind of a conduit to take action so in a way the way to deal with eco anxiety is not weighted for somebody else exactly just get on with it absolutely this is the way you can get on with it because you can work with other people in small units and yeah and hopefully know about it and this is kind of what you've been doing for for a long time actually isn't it yeah yeah I suppose what what our take is and it might seem dissonant to what Michael Mike and Michaela have been saying but it's actually part of I think the strength of the cooperative movement that are different organizations doing different things like my background is in climate science so unfortunately a lot of the stuff that we heard in the last session isn't that new to me it's stuff that I learned 20 30 years ago and has informed my action ever since and I was a environmental activist in the 90s the road protest movement and a lot of other things that came with that and carbon corp came out of not just myself but other people from that era in in Manchester and thinking well how how can we do something that will be both significant enough to meet the challenge of climate change that we know is massive and in doing so empower communities and organizations to do that and I think our approach is we're almost a vanguard you know I think for these other organizations that we're trying to push things as far as possible to show what's kind of what what is possible so I mean for example in the retrofit work that we're doing we've done retrofits where we've pushed that retrofit of existing homes like of the you can imagine the red brick terraces that you see in in Manchester and spent 40 000 pounds and then brought their energy bills down by a thousand pounds a year and that's from a few years ago now it's actually worth even more and just to just to go out and show what's possible because I think one of the things about eco anxiety is that people as individuals feel very disempowered by climate change and they think my small action isn't going to tackle this big thing but by working together collaboratively collectively people do feel a sense of empowerment and a sense they can tackle something like this and co-ops are an ideal way to do that so yeah and I think our thing about massive you know scale of action can can neatly fit with the mass the bigger organizations as well. I mean at what point did you go from protests to actually well action or you know was it a point was it like a a road to Damascus? Yeah well I left the university in 97 and I was a bit disempowered by climate science because I thought a lot of our tutors were like you can't affect change you're meant to be just documenting what's happening a scientist can't get involved you have to be dispassionate and removed and that just didn't sit with me because of the scale of the crisis and I don't really know what I was going to do so in my finals I saw a job advertised in Hume in south Manchester by this worker co-op called ethical consumer magazine that at the time not many people read but it's become more and more prominent and it was like it was an education for me working in a worker co-op at the age of 21 I you talk about being a company director I was a company director at 22 and and I learned all that I mean it wasn't because I was anything special but you were invited in as a worker co-op I learned marketing I learned writing journalism you know I learned all this stuff and and and at the same time I was involved in protest so I always saw those two things like you know trying to stop things but also trying to build things at the same time and the thing that sort of brought it together was cooperatives you know and that sense of empowerment personal empowerment from being a worker co-op but you know there are different ways to be in a co-op I like the idea that combination you know that thing just saying no and the protest but also providing an alternative I think that's really important I think that's where I mean I think XR are brilliant what they do like the the scale of the demonstrations and the creativity and the so visual but I but I do see a sense of frustration from people saying we stopped all this but how can we build something you know and and I think that's part of our job is to show what we can build you know and show all those people that are very clearly against stuff and want to cheer you know we we can we can offer a way you know to do that yeah the solution is not always as spectacular as stopping an airplane landing a runway sometimes it's just the graft of what you're doing of like insulating the houses insulation it's not always sexiest thing but you know and that's where sometimes like I saw the panel people thought I want to saw the panel I was like well if you just use less energy then you know you get the same benefit but you know you can do both and I've been so you've been sort of involved in the co-op Williamson various roles about over 20 years you haven't actually seen it change you know in these issues well certainly in terms of climate change over the years but you know south manchester is really vibrant a lot of small worker co-ops in all kinds of different forms everything from whole food veg to bikes to a lot of housing co-ops and that sort of thing and I think I have seen like a change over time and a more and a growing realization that we can like affect change in that way but I I also kind of contradict what I've said about vanguardism and trying to be out there there is an increasing acknowledgement that that's good but we really do need to scale things that like I was saying in the previous session we've retrofitted a few hundred homes there are 1.2 million homes in great Manchester so the scale the ambitions there and a lot of people thinking about how do you scale or with co-operatives how do you replicate and share what you're doing with the co-ops so you're going to scale the impact not necessarily the co-op itself so in a sense you say like there's you doing 100 homes you'd be perfectly fine the 100 other versions if you didn't manage to do in the 1.2 million it's not competitive basically it's about the result yeah and we can work with people like Andy Burnham who we had on earlier you know Greater Manchester Authority because because there are although that is a council of a sense you know there are ways that co-operatives can work with other partnerships and you know in terms of government and other organisations as well I mean do you think there's more the cooperative movement could be doing to accelerate this process um I think in general like and it's co-ops but others that there is a gap around scaling yeah um a lot and there is sort of what we're talking about a lot of people are talking about it and the government talks about it co-op talk about it but there's not so much thinking into how that happens on the ground you know how do we take those ideas replicate them what kind of support is needed there and um I think that's something that co-ops could be at the forefront of really was that is that something I think that's something that affects what you're doing actually isn't it I mean scaling up is the co-op at doing capable of that is that kind of part of what you're thinking where you are yeah definitely and I think it's um it's a really interesting one because I actually feel now we've got a greater opportunity to scale up on a lot of the things that we possibly didn't have previously and the reason I say that is there is more of a pathway now around the net zero around the carbon emissions reduction there's more of um science based targets advice there's more guidance there that enables us to have more of a consistent pathway together so I'd say a few years ago it was harder to scale up on some things because we probably were doing our own individual things but still sharing best practice which is great and that's what co-ops are really good at but now certainly through the group that I chair we are really understanding from each other that we are so aligned in what we're trying to achieve net zero carbon by 2014 we're trying to align what we're doing measure our carbon emissions in a similar way and we're also identifying on that journey some of the energy saving technologies are really similar that we're all looking at and I think just that as an example by itself is a way we can scale up and previously we've done it around waste management we um working with co-op group and the other retail societies we backhaul our waste and recycling through our distribution networks which we all share that was a great example of the way we we pulled together to scale up and maximize our recycling so we've done it before but I think that pathway we've now got enables us to possibly do it more. I mean do you find frustrating or you're optimistic do you think the scaling up can actually happen? Um I find fast enough because it has to be fast now doesn't it? It does it does have to be fast um I think there are elements that are frustrating they're elements frustrating but and the reason I say that I think it's the there is still and it's still a very complex area and there's a lot of stakeholders that really need to be involved to enable real scaling up so if you talk about net zero carbon journey it's about businesses working together working with supply chains working with suppliers working with local authorities and really getting that full scaling up alignment that's going to be needed and the bill we talked about earlier will hopefully help that because that will bring that alignment and bring that that sort of pushing that through and pushing it through forwards so there's always an element of frustration there that the more we work together the more we would achieve and the more we would accelerate this but there is a lot of optimism there because I see through the group that I chair and across the co-op movement the things that we have already achieved and some of the things that we I know we can do together so it's a bit of both. I mean what what kind of things will the bill bring in that will help to facilitate what you're trying to do? So what I think it will do is it will bring in a consistency because if the bill goes through at a national level a government level what I think that will have a knock on effect is things that businesses have to do and therefore there needs to be that natural consistency so at the moment particularly within co-ops for a number of years I believe co-ops have been ahead of the game on a lot of this stuff and really driving this forward carbon reductions greenhouse gas emissions waste reduction but I think the bill will enable it to be to a certain extent mandatory eventually because I think that's the step that the government would have to take and then that would mean that we would have more alignment across the whole business world and business in the community side of things so that's where I think the the opportunity would come with the bill for businesses. So when you say alignment is it at some time to like a communication with some of the fringes of the movement or is it just everybody's in a slightly different place at the same time? I think everybody's in a slightly different place at the same time I think there are there are some co-ops and I'll talk about the retail co-ops probably more on anything at the moment who are really good at one thing that's maybe the waste reduction side of things and there's some that are really good at the carbon reduction and then some that are really good at the behaviour change and so those different expertise are at different stages on a different journeys depending on where they are so it's all there but it's just that pulling together which is gradually happening and it's sharing the information and the expertise from one sector to another? It is it is sharing the information it's sharing the frameworks we've got in place so one thing that you know I'm really keen to share and have been sharing through this forum is the the one change programme which we've got at Mid Counties Co-op and what we essentially did with one change and and I think there's a relevance here because I think this is a way that you can pull things together. A few years ago we recognised that a lot of people are we mentioned eco anxiety or anxious about climate change and don't know where to start don't know what to do so we did a really simple message around asking our members what the one change they could make to take climate action. We've got a thousand pledges back straight away and we've been building on that further and further since then and then what we could do is pull all those ideas and pledges together and identify a load of collaborative opportunities working with our members so community tidy ups, eco bricks creating things out of waste plastics to build structures and various other bits and then we asked our members the one change they would like us to make as a business and we then set our targets based on that working with members and we committed our AGM recently to halve our greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years but that framework enables us to really connect our members together and I'd be really keen for other co-ops to use that and share that we talked earlier there's no competitive element here we want to share this with others. It's a reciprocal process and it's not like normal business where it's from the top down this is basically you're suggesting ideas but you're listening to the feedback coming back and the critiques that go to you as well aren't you? Definitely yeah absolutely and it goes into I think Michaela mentioned earlier about always questioning and keeping that questioning going all the time so just because you've reached one moment you need to keep asking the members and working with members on what the next thing needs to be and that's the great thing about being a co-op because you have that constant engagement. Michaela do you deal with lots of different sectors of the co-op movement or are you still very much in the area that you're working in? So primarily is the community energy sector but I think the community energy groups that then they themselves vary so much so obviously you've got the more established, the larger ones smaller, some have full-time employees, some are very much volunteer led and they all have kind of different levels of focus but energy generation does tend to be the main kind of area but I think on Jonathan's point and what Jonathan does so well is obviously the retrofit etc and we speak to many groups that kind of really want to get into that space and community energy groups can mobilise quickly and can do the right thing but it's sometimes it's just like we don't know quite how to do it so I think on your point it's not even just great man just through it's how can we get replicates of what you do nationwide and and when it is volunteer led it is very difficult so that's something that desperately needs scaling up so we'll need some thought. What would you need then to do nationwide? Yeah and I think Michaela McHale makes a good point I think that's where maybe there's a slight because we're talking about community energy sector and the cooperative sector and I think there is there is a Venn diagram where the overlap but there's also a separation you do get volunteer led groups in community energy but I think one of the things and one of the things that always attracted me to cooperatives was a social purpose but an economic driver as well so it's kind of we're building our sector our resources our institutions our houses all this sort of thing and it's cooperative you know and so I think we will we replicate best with organisations that do have some like professional staff you know not that many but some professional staff and some expertise and some of the things that you were talking about scale and that barriers to scale and and I think some of the things that sometimes like limit co-ops in the tech sector you've got a good tech starter by dear you know your hot house it with a group of friends you know you come out with a new product what what happens there is like venture capitalists invest and they will look to then invest give you some more money you grow then they'll cash out make a load of money that can't happen in a co-op co-ops are cooperatively owned the assets are locked for the good of society so these venture capitalists don't come in but then that leaves a gap for us you know when we come up with good technology and software like where do we get that bit of money that grows another thing especially and we do a lot around tech increasingly our software developers on the team is around open source especially in this new kind of energy system where there are lots of devices in our homes you know a heat pumps that your vehicle charges we need to shift when we're using them in the in the in the time of the day or night to match the renewable generation we need to be able to as cooperatives manage them in lots of people's homes now if they're all locked down if their software is all proprietary and you know you can't have access to it then that can't happen you know and it locks us out you know and and climate change is a is a societal challenge that we all need to tackle so if we're generating this new software and then we lock it down and no one else can use it it's absolutely daft you know so these are some of the things that limit our kind of thing access to resources access to finance and like that open source open data kind of approach so in a way not just part of the solution maybe a very very big part of the solution to the sort of zero carbon problem is working cooperatively with in coops because the old ways the old structures the old companies they're like big dinosaurs just before the asteroid hits and the cops like the small mammals are about to take over yeah I like that but I think if we're all in silos and and that kind of private sector private profit kind of conceptualisation is like we draw a ring around our activity we do our thing we try and grow our thing it doesn't work on a societal level kind of problem where we need to tackle it together co-operatives it does work you know because we we generally work together community energy movement it's a great example that we're doing really great well we hope we're doing really great stuff in greater Manchester we don't have an ambition to go to Glasgow and to do something there or or Birmingham we we work with the groups that are already there and we help them and they help us in return so that really is part of like that challenge you know and meeting the challenge mean insulation is obviously key but what what other things need to be done you know is it like a checklist you know is it is like a 10 or a 5 that need um in terms of like tackling climate change the big ticket items are homes domestic energy um energy generation which Michaela's very much involved with like greening that more renewables that sort of thing there are then challenges around transport as well how we get around there's a lot of talk about electric vehicles personally I get around on electric bike and I'm like a huge advocate for electric bikes in a city as well but we just need to be doing more walking more cycling and that sort of thing and and where necessary electric vehicles the bits that are kind of missing and the bits that probably less cooperative action at the moment are things like how do we create steel you know green steel from renewables and that sort of thing these are these are big issues that we don't yet know fully how we're going to meet those challenges so that's like a site for research and development innovation and that sort of thing so it's it's not a series of like big spectacular changes as it is it is basically the small grafting the little things I think this is one of my frustrations that government um they will go for a big hydrogen thing over here or a big nuclear thing over here where they could be benefiting you know small soul traders like people in the construction industry all over the UK you know that'd be a much better thing to do yes it's less sexy and it's less kind of like oh a big ticket item but it would actually enrich lots of like small construction organisations and it would make people's homes healthier more comfortable and greener places to live you know I mean for you what the key things that need to be changed yeah so I think um if you're looking at a business model cooperative business model for a for retail cooperative the first thing is the the operations so our day-to-day operations so our trading sites that type of thing we need to make those as energy efficient as possible and reduce our energy reduce our energy on greenhouse gas emissions associated with that so that's things like energy efficient refrigeration um low energy lighting that type of thing in in our operations but then you would then go beyond that and then look at how we're working with our suppliers and our products and services so how are you working the supply chain to make it to work with our suppliers to help them reduce their environmental footprint but how are we making our products more environmentally friendly to enable our members and consumers to use less carbon in their day-to-day lifestyles as well so I think those those two major aspects are balancing together so if you had like a checklist for sort of retail co-ops on what we need to do towards net zero so the operation side of things the day-to-day the supply chain and then it's how we're working with our members customers and communities and that's through the products and services but also from the education side of things as well enabling people to understand what they can do in their day-to-day and that's quite a standard checklist because if you if you can derive as much reductions in those areas as possible that does take you on that pathway towards net zero and we're obviously then you need to do some more work beyond that as well but that's a quite a decent rule of thumb for what you'd have to focus on as a general business. I mean if we reconvene here next year one one year for today do you think we'd be much further down the path or we still be having the same conversation? I think we'll be I think we'll be quite a bit way down the path and the reason I say that is because I think the if we took those three aspects I just spoke about there operationally I think there's um there's great stuff been going on for a while and hopefully it will carry on but the bit that's really starting to come through is this concept of low carbon products and services that people are starting to produce and try and enable people to get involved in and actually purchase and get involved so I would hope in a year's time that's come on even further the things that obviously have been spoken around community energy low carbon products I think they're really coming forward so I would say in a year's time what I would hope to see is they've really taken off more people are enabled to make a difference and take action and the operation stuff will hopefully have carried on as well. So will you say that your role basically is to facilitate the space for these ideas to thrive or actually to create the ideas as well or both? I would say I'd say it's a bit of both but what I would say is I think we there is a lot of great ideas now being developed out there and I think it's listening to those ideas and getting the right people together to take action on those ideas so I would say it's definitely a facilitation point of view on getting those right ideas together because there's some really good stuff that's coming out and certainly from a business point of view sometimes it can be quite difficult is understanding the right things to do in the right places and understanding if they've worked successfully in the past and the great thing about the co-op movement is you can generally talk to another co-op society and say we're thinking of doing this has it worked for you and they can give you some feedback and vice versa and that's a great thing about being a co-op and not having that network. I mean some of the ideas will they they're existing beyond the co-opism movement aren't they these are just ideas maybe working people in isolation and is it a case of trying to get these people into the fold as well and encouraging them to work within the framework of the co-opism movement? Yeah it's definitely it's definitely getting the expertise from from outside and getting that feedback in and I think some of that also goes back to some of the many things we've talked about over today and I'm sure we've spoken about yesterday as well about the next generation of cooperators coming through as well and the ideas coming through from the younger generation because we do a huge amount of work we've got 50 partner schools that we work with and go in and do some education sessions around climate action and I think some of the ideas that are going to be coming through there and probably I'm sure already are coming through is bringing that into the movement as well and getting those ideas forward I think is a good opportunity for us. I think because that generation is so clwed up on these issues this is a good time to co-opism movement and this is a time for that generation to get involved in a platform that can actually make those ideas thrive isn't it? It is and it's something like our one change campaign which I mentioned that's something that we are going to be using and are using with that next generation of cooperators as well so trying to reach out and get those ideas back into us the youth forums that Michaela has mentioned as well I do think from a co-operative point of view there are those networks that enable those people in I think we've just got to keep working on attracting them in and getting them in in the right way and that's something you're working on. Yeah absolutely and I think just one point to add and Jonathan's point and kind of what action cults can do immediately is and sometimes I think it's slightly frustrating that you see out there governments kind of dangle the carrots and they quickly take them away so what I would say is just if there's a carrot being dangled and grab it quickly before it goes so for instance like on the transport side of things obviously yes we should walk and yes we should cycle but some people are going to use cars and need to use cars so for instance you can get an electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme and that's obviously like a tax benefit so um that's something we at mid counties offer but we don't know how long that's going to be around for so if it's there at the moment those those the quick wins that you can do now so anything like that just absolutely grab and then the more challenging stuff is kind of yet the next steps but I would say take that low hanging fruit while you can because who knows when it's going to go okay so uh I know it's not hundreds of people here but there must be a question on the floor right there there no it's okay it's okay it's thanks um john you mentioned about what the challenges are jonathan's mentioned about what the challenges are and I guess victor last night in the closing section made a fairly impassioned pee for plea for us as co-operators to make a real difference um we heard just a from Eva who was from Repair in London I would love to see this in a year's time to say right what difference has that made um mikaela are we doing anything with Repair in London is there something we could do with Repair in London how do we use congress to bring these groups together and make a difference I guess yeah good question I'm glad I quickly spoke to Eva before this chat but yeah unity we do currently work with Repair in London we've got a few power purchase agreements and I spoke with day fuller Repair in London earlier in the week in terms of finance and kind of those challenges around that sector and then I think following that an area that we could really kind of work collaboratively on is um the fabulous work that Repair in do with um engaging the next generation the youth training programs and and how can we help support that so absolutely I think there's definitely something we can do there so yeah I'll speak to you after this Eva maybe else want to pick up on that I just say that I think congress is a really important time for people to come together to make those personal contacts and links to highlight those kind of key kind of ways that people can work together so I think it's really one to be valued and personally I've really missed the opportunity to like meet and network with people you know during the pandemic so yeah yeah and I would I would add in that I think this time next year would be a really good opportunity to update on um where we are across that court retail society point of view um where we are on the journey especially around the net zero off the back of the bill that was presented earlier as well because that's where that real good best practice sharing is going on um and and I think a lot of those societies can embrace things like the one change principle and to see how that has grown and developed would be great I mean obviously getting to that zero is going to be it probably isn't possible and there's so many other factors but I hope to miss sky do you think we'll get close I think that there are um some businesses who are really taking it seriously and can see the overall benefits of doing it I want to say overall benefits there are if it's done well there are a huge amount of benefits to a business you know the ethical consumer side of things people wanting to then be their customers because they're ethical enriching net zero and there are a number of other benefits as well but obviously there's also costs with it so I think there are certain businesses and institutions who who are going to be really have good advocates for it and really drive it but I think it also needs that government push to really make it happen as well so it definitely needs to be both so a bit of optimism there for some of the businesses but the push really needs to happen I think as well the government to make the space for it to happen to make the space for it to happen yeah and the legislation and to and to really yeah to make that legislative compliance that the businesses would have to then follow and report on and I think the really important point that was made earlier as well about avoiding the greenwashing as well the greenwashing that could really spill out if if we're not careful around all of this it has to be really open and transparent reporting I don't know that's something that that is the whole concept of net zero as well so that needs to be really important and that goes back to what I was saying before not being afraid to admit the problems and the mistakes as well isn't it because you just embrace and don't even find solutions yeah definitely admitting admitting where the where the issues are and where where businesses cannot openly hold their hands up and say it's really hard to achieve this this side of things and we're not there yet and I do think there is a real fear across businesses in general to be able to announce that type of thing and openly say you know we're not doing very well in this area but we're doing okay in this area so I think having that open transparency will help but also that almost equal playing field as well will help as well that everybody has to achieve a certain threshold and that will hopefully help with that greenwashing side of things I think that's a really good attitude to have I think because like I think we're saying this I'm saying the start there are some businesses it's much harder to green green off aren't they so as long as they're saying we just can't do it anybody can give us some help you know well there's just a bit we're just impossible to change the tech is not there yet you know if you're flying somewhere there's no way around it you can't get a train for 180 hours can you so so admitting the problems is as important as finding the solutions isn't it it is it is and the more we talk about it the more the education's been mentioned a few times the awareness and education of people will improve because the more people will understand that there are certain business models where certain things are really difficult but they're working on it some business models will lend itself to be able to do things much easier but the more open those conversations are I think the better understanding there will be for everyone around what really needs to happen and where some of those issues are I mean working in Manchester and it's it's working hard to get to do all this thing in it but there's still big problems and I mean what you know are you optimistic that even a city that you're working in embedded in can overcome those problems a city that was built basically on the industrial revolution ironically yeah I mean I always think about like the Rochdale pioneers you know and in a time where access to like safe food and safe like drinking products and what have you was limited where there was deregulation and capitalism was run rampant at that time cooperatives formed in a in a context where governments couldn't or wouldn't act you know and that's I see this as our time you know it's a it's a similar context you know there is a huge societal problem here around energy access to energy and as we haven't mentioned energy justice and the fact that there are people who are marginalized from resources full stop let alone from the either and they're not cushioned from the impacts of climate change price energy price rises that we're seeing at the moment I think this is the time for cooperatives to take action where you know government can't or won't and I'm optimistic that that we will do that you know in some shape or form and at different scales in different ways that's the interesting thing about this isn't it because it's you know it's not just a zero carb is it's actually aiming for the whole raft of political issues that kind of go around it like people get paid properly people get looked after a fairer society actually is all embedded and entwined with this cause yeah like climate justice is the concept that those who are more responsible for climate emissions take more responsibility for fixing those and that's actually embedded into the un climate charter is that the rich nations will take responsibility for action and help those that can't the poor nations and I would say within the UK that the UK government is is loath to do that and there are there are a few examples of that what I think we need to see is a redistribution of resources between rich and poor in the UK with there's been interesting talk about solidarity tariffs within energy so I'm willing to pay a bit more to help other people that aren't that are more vulnerable to this and I think that's good and the a certain amount of volunteerism is a good thing but I think there should also be more systemic ways that that mean that resources are transferred and the most most vulnerable are helped with those kind of ideas and those kind of ideals it actually makes it easier to get to a zero carbon as well yeah absolutely because I think these things are intertwined you know access to resources privilege vulnerability all is wrapped up within within these ideas of climate change and and decarbonisation it's like rampant capitalism cause every single one those problems isn't it well I was a whole other debate is it one more question John John we've had a couple online oh really yeah wow we're in a high tech time well where do they turn up we'll do those do the table ones they'll do the online ones yeah are you going to shout them out in a minute cool hi so I'm Shaz I'm from community energy Birmingham I also work for a big six energy company in my day job this is a question for Jonathan and Michaela so uh for example I work for Eon and demand for solar panels has got 5 000% and demand for heat pumps is meant to skyrocket but I keep trying to tell people about ventilation and insulation but nobody will listen to me so how do we scale up those I know there's the carbon cup and I invested in the share offer but how do we make that like a mainstream thing where people actually think about external insulation before they think about the solar panels yeah that's a good question I mean there are many things to that that there is like the compulsion and the and the government and local government kind of regulation of like how housing works and I think we talked about vulnerability and there are private private sector tenants that are living in poor conditions and there is a role and a responsibility for government to to ensure that those those houses are operating to a good standard and a good energy standard as well um I think there's also a job in like the what it's horrible but the owner occupy people that own their own homes and for too long now insulation has been seen as like some sort of cost-neutral thing like some sort of thing everyone asks us about payback when when's the payback time um and yet people are more than willing to invest thousands of pounds in a new kitchen in a in a new extension or a loft conversion or a new car and they never ask when that car will pay back you know so part of it is about how we present it to people we present it as an investment in their property one that will make it more comfortable a better property a more you know more longevity and help the environment as well and do something about their bills so I think there's a there's a job there and how we present it to people um I do also think there is like that support around like um you know funding insulation from a from a government point of view from a energy supply point of view um there are schemes out there that will help you to do a heat pump but there are but there are precious schemes that will help you to do insulation as well so this is like a number of things there I don't know mackerel if you've got thoughts yeah I completely agree and I think your point about almost changing the psyche of kind of this consumerism with the your home is exactly that so you would happily get a new roof if it meant you know you won't get have water leaking it and so we need to totally change that and I think as I'll do the thing is just kind of people just don't know where to start I think and that's the biggest thing and it's like it seems such a challenge people kind of ignore it I would say and I'm also speaking from my own personal experience you know I need to do energy efficiency in my home I work in energy but bit of me still like oh we're doing quite no way to start so I'll put that to the back burner but but we need to bring it to the forefront and just give people kind of that guidance of this is how you do it and this is where you start and give people that starting point I mean eventually it will be a mainstream normal idea it's doing but it's just trying to get there as fast as possible isn't it yeah on the same table hello Eva from rebowing London um I think it's more common than a question but I just feel like we talk a lot about net zero and I'm happy Mike that you mentioned greenwashing because I do feel like sometimes net zero is a good expression for companies to hide behind for the purposes of greenwashing because the problem with this net zero concept is that it's net zero so you can be still doing business as usual but buying for trees to be planted somewhere on the planet you can even purchase like buy like pay someone or a company to not chop down trees and that counts as carbon savings so it's like it's a useful concept but it's also a little bit like very ambivalent and and I think we just have to be mindful of that when we talk about decarbonizing and like using the words like degrowth or system change more is going to help us also trying to avoid companies hiding behind this this sometimes very convenient concept of net zero I think you mentioned that before weren't you know like try to just have to call out the greenwashing as much as possible isn't it absolutely yeah open transparency in reporting and uh and again going back to the bill one of the great things in there as well as as well as a net zero concept obviously it was we restoring the natural habitats as well which which goes to the point you know it's more than just the net zero element it's actually the other part um but yeah reporting transparency really important may point out to them actually it's not good business to greenwash the you know if they actually made the extra effort but like insulating all the houses it looks like bit too difficult moments perhaps in the long term it's probably better for them not to greenwash definitely definitely I mean it but you would like to think that the green washes will get found out eventually won't you because eventually there will be a realisation that that is greenwash and it's no way you're going to be anywhere in line with the path that we need to go to okay so the online question one yeah can I ask them at the same time or just do this more at once yeah sir Helen Jackson asks how and can the co-op and social enterprise sectors work together more on this agenda especially in scaling up I think that might be more for you yeah I think um I think that's a really really good question and one one thing we've we've got a real good live example that actually we're working with um at midcount is working with a spire in the Oxford area and a social enterprise hub and local social enterprise projects and in that particular area to try and identify what we can do more collaboratively collaboratively around climate change and one topic we're particularly looking at is the ethos that um people a lot of people are socially excluded from be able to take action around climate change because they just can't get involved in it for whatever reason often economic reasons and and through that network we are starting to look and go on that journey really early stages for us on that journey though but through our networks we are starting to find out a little bit more we've already had an online co-op conversation event with various stakeholders to learn a bit more about what we can do and a lot of it really does fit in with this type of power share model type of thing we talked about enabling more people to access this type of thing so I think it's a really good point and so in we'll will certainly be looking to build on a bit more where we are anybody else want to pick up on that I think just events like this are great because we we get to meet and and discuss ideas and share ideas and and that that's a really key way for us to work together you know working together and Martin was asking could the cooperative retail societies do more to use their stores as public information centres on climate change I think the answer to that is is is yes I think that's a really good point um I think there are a few things that we could do and and actually do do in some cases um I think there could be more signposting around what we're actually already doing within those stores and within our businesses but also more information points more points around um advice that people can actions people can take I mean we took our one change concept we could be having more of that sort of interaction hub in some of our stores and others can as well um there are stores that do do some really good engagement around this sort of thing but yeah I do think there's an opportunity to outreach in that way because there's obviously of usually often a tendency to use the obviously online functions to do this type of thing but so many people obviously coming in out of our stores um there is good opportunities to interact there so I think that's a really good point and we do do it but we could probably do a bit more how would you do it it's not just not a flyers on the counter is it I mean how would you get the information out in a way that people can see it and relate to it is is a way you do it yeah there so so the way that we would we would do it and and we have got platform to do this at the moment is within some of our stores we've got what we would call community spaces or community hub areas which has got areas where members customers can go in to learn what's going on in the community there's someone that they can sometimes talk to there's a there's a like an iPad screen that people can look through to look at information that's going on within our businesses signage there we run localised when I call them events so localised interactive days where we're to someone's always going to be there and we let people know that people are there and before we've invited people like um I think the carbon trust have attended one of our stores before and various other people so the customers can come in and learn more about a particular topic um within a couple of our stores we've got an even bigger space where we can run some education sessions as well so there'd be a mixed way of doing it there'd be some information where we're tighter for space and some others where there's a bit more space with a more an interactive type hub I just think that's a really brilliant question and my mind is racing with a thousand ideas and I think this is why congress I guess is so great is because it you know I guess with any company or co-operative you're in your own o leco chambers and what so it's really great to just hear other voices and I think some of the first sort of points I'm thinking is you know at mid counties we get three volunteering days a year could we use you know we've got a masses of colleagues could we use that kind of volunteering led approach instead of we do lots of great work we litter picking but you know in a crisis like this could we do a shift change and um and maybe have people in stores and have thermal imaging camera that we can lend to the community I don't know I just I guess my point is there is so much potential we could do um but it's just what's what's priority and how can we act quick I'd agree with that and I'd one thing I'd love to see retail societies do more of is invest in the community share issues that we've heard about today so much community energy and renewables football clubs and all this sort of thing we can really build the cooperative movement you know through investment and through growth that way again it's kind of like cooperation you know growing through cooperation brilliant well that's a good place to end yeah so thanks to the panel thank you thank you very much so um we're going to be going into our final session we're just letting the people come down from the other sessions so we'll be starting in about four minutes this really is the day I had the ones that I left now we shall see but yeah thank you very much to a brilliant panel and I'll spare with us for a few minutes if I would turn it around thank you everybody can you all give me a bit of a smile please because I just need to document this this is the diehard I'm going to be going through this this is the serious absolute diehard co-operators in this room so give us a wave everyone fantastic I can't believe there's this many people here still um right talking about a really important matter the cooperative identity this is part of a process which I'm sure we'll talk about we've got half an hour at the start of the process there's going to be lots more consultation on this but we couldn't end the the two days we've had without not touching on this subject matter so I've got a brilliant panel here but um we've got Ian Adelaith from the FDA we've got Dr Sarah Aldridge from the cooperative college and Ewa I'm going to hand over to you from Cooperatives UK thank you thank you so much for staying we honestly thought there was going to be us three talking to ourselves so thank you for staying and when we knew we were going to be the last half hour of the day we thought what you know what would you be up for at this point so we thought a couple of videos and a chat and a quiz is pretty much what we're going to do in the next half hour um so we've um as you said we've got Sarah and Ian I'm just going to do a little bit of an introduction so we've got a couple of videos and then this can be the start of the consultation with you once we've talked about what the ICA are actually going to be doing around um the ID consultation so the reason that I'm up here at COPS UK it's part of my role to um interpret our ID policy and we use the ICA statement to influence our statement of ID as well when Victor talked yesterday about don't talk about the principles you know these these boring people who like the rules I love Victor and I was like oh no because that's me and I you know I love the rules I love the principles that's that's what I do every day and they're so important they're really important but everything that you said was also right we need to be able to find a way to use them that make them attractive to people who are in this room but also people that aren't and so we do hopefully as part of this consultation have a real opportunity to be able to do that having said all of that I think right now COPS UK more than ever before is embracing more types of organizations more ways to cooperate we're welcoming more organizations into membership than we possibly would before that the ICA that the FCA definitely wouldn't admit as co-op just entertainment that Sarah was talking about yesterday I would say even just a year ago 18 months ago they wouldn't have come to us number one and we would probably have turned them away number two and so I think it's great now that we we have this relationship with organizations and we need to be able to use the principles to welcome them in and not to use something to shake our heads and say no you're not exactly what we're looking for so go away and maybe come back when you are but instead we can we can embrace them but as I say the rules can be really important the values and principles are really important and we do need to use them to guard against misuse but we do need to find a way to communicate them better help us to be more inclusive reach a wider audience and let's not hide behind the values and principles let's use them for something positive and so we do have an opportunity right now to influence the ICA statement and the ICA are running a global consultation and we all need to get involved so we have a video from Alexandra Wilson from the ICA my name is Alexandra Wilson I'm a member of the global board of the ICA and chair of the cooperative identity advisory group the advisory group is overseeing a consultation and reflection on the statement of the cooperative identity the statement was adopted in 1995 after an extensive consultation process it includes a universal definition of a cooperative sets out the cooperative principles and identifies the ethical and cooperative values that underpin those principles the purpose of the current consultation and reflection the third in the ICA's history is to deepen our cooperative identity and to explore whether the statement on the cooperative identity remains fit for purpose in our contemporary world the consultation began in December with the release of a background paper and the deliberations of the 33rd world cooperative congress you can find the paper and the congress outcomes on the ICA website the consultation is continuing the surveys the first one is out now educational webinars online consultation events and discussions of the sort you will have at your meeting today the advisory group will table its recommendations with the ICA board any proposed changes to the identity statement and there may be none will be considered at least two general assemblies of the ICA the consultation will be wide and deep wide in the sense that we will reach out to cooperatives of every type in every economic sector in which cooperatives are active all over the world and deep in the sense that we will reach beyond the ICA's direct members to include cooperatives at all levels going right to the grassroots as well as individual cooperators in that spirit I would encourage you all to respond to our first survey you will find it on the ICA website it is open to members of cooperatives their members experts and all others interested in cooperatives please take a few minutes of your time to share your top of mind views and tell us whether you would like to be kept informed of upcoming consultation events so oh my gosh right just quickly in terms of the consultation process that alexandria was talking about there so and this is where it's like it needs to be more interesting than than this um and we really need to bring this to life and that's what you know that's what we're definitely going to do in the uk 2021 ica congress they um they started talking about the um the um the process that they were going to follow following up from that there was a delegate consultation it's already happened ica global identity panel that's been set up that's who um alexandria is she chairs it pauling green is the uk representative on the panel there currently we've got global consultation one that's happening right now um if you go on the ica website there's a questionnaire to fill in um up to now you know as usual court movements or questionnaires and congresses and everything else the global consultation two is where we can all really get involved that's going to be in the autumn um and it's going to be something that everyone in the court movement is going to need to really get behind as victor said yesterday we need to talk much more widely not just to ourselves but cops uk isn't going to do all of this on your behalf we're just not going to be able to um it's too big and so we are going to be coming out to you all to think about any sessions you're having any meetings any consultations that you might be doing in your in your areas or in your societies so that we can get as many people's views as possible um on um the the statement um a couple of people have said to me over the weekend what is the ica statement and it's just like i think that tells you everything you need to know by the way it's the it's the sentence of what a co-op is it's the values it's the principles you can comment on that as well i try to find an interesting picture to to define the ica values and principles and and you can't really find one it's just words and so it's trying to find a way also i think as part of the the consultation to help to bring this to life for other people who aren't as embedded as what we are in pictures and graphics and however we can do it to help us to communicate this a little bit better 2023 ica congress is apparently when the first changes um to the statement will come for consideration um by the delegates and then again it will be talked about at the 2024 ica congress so we have really this autumn up until about march next year to be able to feed into the consultation so ian do you just want to come and you can throw your hat into the ring on id thank you and emma hopefully put me in a session about an hour and a half two hours early to get all the controversial stuff out in there so i didn't say as much of it as much of it now it won't surprise you as a lawyer working the registry authority i think definitions are important um and spend a lot of time on rules definitions are only important if you want anything legal status tax treatment policy aimed at you funding etc if you don't less important um so it's kind of up to the co-op movement as to what level of importance it attaches to it i'd say the as to whether this statement's important we use it in our decision making on a day-to-day basis we use it in our guidance we reflected that in our policy with any definition you decide how uh how well defined that is what gets how sure you need to be whether something's in it or out of it and people won't always agree or disagree on each of those instances and each of those decisions i would say a challenge is to understand what the ica statement actually is there's a tendency to jump to the values and to the principles and to overlook the definition i won't read out the full definition you'd be pleased to know but you know the autonomous association of persons etc because that is the minimum statement that co-operatives should be meeting that definition is not aspirational that's a minimum statement the principles are not principles the guidelines it says so they are guidelines for putting into place the values to help you meet that minimum statement and go beyond it in terms of what a co-operative is so i think it's really important to look at that only in the session earlier there was a debate about the definition about meeting the common economic cultural and social needs and aspirations of members and how it is all three and it is part of that so for i would say the starting point is to have a good look at the ica statement and think through how is that working in practice in your co-operative what i would say the the ica produced some really helpful documentation in 2015 guidelines on the principles it had this helpful section called matters for future consideration underneath each principle and most of the things falling in that matters for future consideration are things that we're making decisions on on a day to day basis and a lot of those haven't been fully considered since 2015 when they were labeled as being for future consideration so the challenge is define it or accept that somebody else will because other people are having to make decisions on those things so i really would encourage people to to engage in it and i would say from our perspective we're one way we're really pleased to be here today we're back to have these conversations with people to get the feedback to hear things those that know we're very happy to hear frank using expressions from people and all things with us so we're really pleased as well more recently we've been doing some working on some really good initial engagement with the larger retail societies as we're doing a piece of work a short questionnaire looking at member economic participation and member democratic control in a way to explore that topic further which might go into other work that we do in the future and those sort of questions and those sort of topics are really important for co-opters to be looking at on a day to day basis and those things are peppered throughout the ica statement and there's been a lot of talk lastly i'm just going to go down a slightly anirachy point to double down on the opposite of yesterday there's been lots of talk about the rockstar pioneers and the one pound membership it was only a pound between 1844 and 1845 at 1845 he amended it to be four pounds so when you're looking at the levels of commitment and what members have done and you look at that actually we know we like it but we need to go back and look at it and look at what it actually was and what it actually said and how it evolved and i think the same is true of the statement and looking at the things that underpin that and looking at the things particularly from 1995 and the background paper of the work to approach the consultation with a deep understanding through the lens of how it's working your co-operative now so i'll pause her thank you so it's over to you um i have the job of guiding you through the slide out so um you will find in your brochure at the beginning brochure there is a um a barcode that you need to click on and there are two questions um and the first question is is the ica statement fit for purpose it's on page four you just need to scan it yeah and then the second question is um what's missing from the principles so we're just going to see what's going to start coming in because it's an interactive bit so you should hopefully start seeing some activity on the screen and then we have five minutes which i'm going to throw over to you just to you know just get some general feedback but this is very much the beginning of the consultation as everyone said you know we want maximum participation across the UK movement because it's a really good opportunity to kind of shape but this is the beginning of a conversation so and it's going to last over the next 18 months so this it's where it's all starts today all starts today we we can throw it out to a question so um or or actually we could just we could put our hands up so okay so this is what's now come in um so is a statement of cooperative identity fit for purpose um most people said they don't know which is a good start i would say um so i'm going to throw this out to the audience before go to the next question um does anybody have any comments on this in the don't know area so so nick i think are you are you murmuring on the screen can you just check my slides because i think that the actual ICA statement might be maybe the next one along and again no anyway you mean you don't know what you don't know what the the statement is sorry no i thought you said it would be useful to have it on the screen i was you know have you got have you got anything to say on this i mean i could probably go yeah for the next week do it do it uh sadly because i i was following the discussion at that cell about the statement i've spent the last month going back and rereading all of the previous iterations of the identity it was only the identity statement in 1995 before that there were just cooperative uh principles but it is interesting the processes that we went through and i think this is i think it is important that it is a collective coming together to define ourselves for ourselves it's not somebody else telling us who we are and what we are and what we're supposed to be i think the the the this uh the original identity statement you see at the beginning of the cooperative identity statement i think originally as Sarah will know comes from the ILO statement which the corp college blessed them were intimately involved in creating that consultation with the ILO back in the 90s when they produced the the fantastic which is what i recommend anybody who who's interested if you go back and look at what the ILO declaration is i think it's 197 is it the ILO declaration about cooperatives if the world had ever fulfilled that statement would be in a lot better place than we are now it is a fantastic document and it does give international legitimacy for governments being asked to incorporate cooperative legislation into their body politic which is why for example Ian has the cooperative identity statement in his in his guidelines for fca registration in britain so i think it i think this process is incredibly important but i do think that uh as a consumer operator the the the principles are very lopsided towards consumer cooperatives uh and i think that we we we we shouldn't shrink from being critical of what they what they don't say uh they say some great things but they don't mention workers the statement on the environment is wishy washy and pretty much nonexistent so there is a there is a huge opportunity for us to look at the look at this again and i think every you know uh i remember when i was in Holland once one of the dutch's cooperators said to me every generation has to make the cooperative belong to them so in a way that what we're doing for us old farts like me now is trying to pass on this movement to the next generation and it's for us to help them to define it so it's something that they own and belongs to them and they will take forward on our behalf you know when we disappear off the seat so i do think this process is very very important and i really appreciate that what you're trying to do because it's lacking what something that could be very dry uh very serious and interesting it's quite challenging but the two things reasons why i think the brits or sprit should take it seriously one is the original principles were from bloody rochdale you know and i still like principle five no credit but but the and they didn't change till 1936 and then the last time the iteration was in manchester so i think we have a very special role in principle in getting involved in this iteration wonderful thank you nick thank you um i'm just conscious this is the last slot so um and yeah just to reiterate what you were saying as well it is you know these the purpose of these are they are they can be changed and that's the whole purpose of this consultation is that we want you to get really really engaged with it so i'll go to the second question um we have just got one question oh elaine off to you right um thanks um i agree totally with nick that we are just custodians of cooperatives and we we have to make them fit to hand over and hand them over in good purpose um to our successors and uh you know we should have a succession plan but going back to something that ian said um definitions are only really important or meaningful if they hold interest um if they're just a sort of meaningless blurb uh then it doesn't really resonate with anyone and i think this particular one does need zipping up a bit um it seems to be missing um along with the things that that nick said about workers i agree um environmental sustainability world peace you know that's what we're about and and youth engagement to bring on that next generation of custodians so i think it would be helpful to sort of try and um incorporate that as well it's amazing thank you elaine so we've got world peace we've got you just world peace brilliant um and we'll try and get zipping up in the um in the new word in that as well um so the next the second question then was um what's missing from the principles and i think we both i think we've probably touched on this but um just because we want you to use slido again um yes in one to two words are are there any important areas missing from the principles and this is a free for all you should have a text book so just throw anything in there so everybody's typing everyone's trying to stick to two words so if there's anybody in the room that doesn't have a phone and wants to say something that this is a great opportunity so jenny you good oh oh environment that's the power of dr george i mean that was an amazing session actually i'm very sobering but can someone explain jedi go on mark so um mark jedi so hello mark simons culture i'm part of some international co-optive organisations mainly around sociocracy um and those circles are quite interested in this quite excited by this and particularly the us worker cart people that that i'm involved with um are interested in it from this point of view of what they call jedi which is this diversity inclusion of what they call justice equity diversity and inclusion so that's why i put jedi check brilliant although some of them are starting to say diege now to put diversity at the front anybody else wants a comment on what we're seeing here i mean it's great to see it i mean just just the themes that have been coming out of the workshops of the past two days environment he's just at the centre of it all really but any any other comments sharyl oh service um the quality um thing i i would have thought that could go in this principle one voluntary and open membership and i've i'm a trade union rep and involved in other things to do with equality and so on and we're rewriting a lot of guidelines and codes of practice and codes of ethics and so on at the moment and what we're trying to get rid of is this list of things gender social racial political religious and just talk about equality with no discrimination and not specify all these different things and especially to get rid of the word racial because um although racism is a thing race is not a thing and we need to get this idea out of people's heads this old idea that unesco already said 50 some years ago that races is not it's not a scientific concept although racism is a thing so yeah i would say principle one needs to be rewritten um and that's where you would put in the equality and and inclusion and so on great right well thank you everyone um and there again we just wanted to get a bit of flavour we just wanted to ask the room um and this is a start so today we're ending um congress at the start and started by starting a conversation we're going to be reporting back probably next year um probably doing a similar similar activities but i'll just say please get engaged um and please you know um culture k through emmer will be um kind of just telling you what the framework and the process is going to be but yeah please get engaged so emmer no yeah just to finish we just have one last message again just a call to action to end um congress hello everybody i'm pauling green and it's my great delight to have been asked to say a few words to you at your first in-person congress since covid struck and you know it's no exaggeration to say that the last few years have changed our lives covid brexit social environmental health economic crisis and now war again on the continent of europe it's at times like this that the cooperative movement is so important so i just want to say a few words about the work being done by the international cooperative alliance to review its identity globally the last time the ica reviewed its identity i had the great privilege to be president of the international cooperative alliance and the result of that was the blueprint for a cooperative decade which saw a renaissance in cooperative development all across the world and perhaps the long-lasting result of it was the development of the cooperative mark which is now used by co-ops across the globe and what it did was to give us a sense of our own strength across the world and our unity of purpose across the world so what the ica is now looking to do is to build on that and to make sure that our our identity is not only right in bringing the values and principles that have stood us in such good stead for over 200 years to the fore but actually that they're relevant and right for today so i hope that when you get the invitation to take part in the surveys and the consultation on the working group and and its interim report and its final report that you will do so because these events give us the chance to demonstrate unity of purpose across the globe to make sure our brand is up to date and modern and our identity is synonymous with that brand so i hope very much that you will take part it's a crucial time for so many people across the world poverty is rising we know that the environmental crisis is is going to be really important in the coming in the coming years and co-ops can do so much on the whole range of issues that now confront us so i hope that you will take part in the icas activities join in the consultation make your views known britain was the heart of the cooperative movement where it began so let's make sure that we're part of its future thank you very much and enjoy congress that really is it and i've been reliably informed the die hard aren't just in the room they're still online as well so props to everybody and i just want to end by saying thank you very much to the cooperative bank for enabling it to be free online for all those members we do have feedback forms we've done lots of things differently no idea what you think of them really keen to see what works what we can improve and really start to think now about next year so feedback forms are at the front desk are there in your programme as if we're not busy enough on monday co-op fortnight starts so just to remind really that we want you to unwrap your co-ops look at that they're very slick out of this team and we want to know why why you're in a co-op and what it means to you and if you do go to co-op uk.co-op slash fortnight there are assets there that you can use within your co-op to go to your members and really ask those questions so please help us with that and again feedback we've had in the past is that why concentrate on a fortnight so you'll see we've done it slightly differently the fortnight is going to kick off what will be a continuing and growing campaign and it will feed into that census work and what we talked about in terms of understanding what it is that motivates people to join and engage with their co-ops if you final thank yous I can't thank everybody in person but I do want to thank both my chair and advice chair and the whole co-op UK board for the support that they've given us giving me in particular for the past year but giving us to make sure that congress is a success that I hope you agree it's been and I would also like to thank the co-operatives UK staff who've been phenomenal they've really really done incredibly well thank you and most importantly I'd like to thank you our members you know all I can do is invite you here to talk and boy have you been talking so thank you for an incredible congress and I'd like to see us back well not it here but you know theoretically it here at congress next year with feedback and you know double the numbers please next year double the size of the movement but not by next year thank you to you all it's been incredible but safe journey home