 Welcome back. Now we'll have to wait until next week for the official statistics on how many companies became insolvent last year but the most recent figures from the ONS point to a rising trend or bucking that though are cooperatives and mutuals organizations that are owned by members such as employees, customers or suppliers. The latest statistics suggest new cooperatives are more than twice as likely to survive for five years than other new startups and that cooperatives are five times less likely to cease trading than other businesses. Well joining me now to talk about this is Rose Marley, Chief Executive of Cooperatives UK. Rose, welcome to you. To what extent are these figures skewed by the existence of some very long established cooperatives like the co-op group John Lewis Nationwide Building Society and so on? Morning Ian. Great question. Then we take them over a five-year period and actually when you look at the small business, the small cooperatives like community owned pubs, they're growing actually and we're monitoring this closely for that exact reason but the thing is about mutuals and cooperatives because they're owned and in the case of cooperatives controlled by their members. This resilience comes from the decision making process, it's not driven by the need to get private individual or shareholder profit, it's driven by the needs of the customers and members that they serve in. So the decisions, we saw it in the pandemic, you know people were more prepared to you know mucking as you know volunteers or were more prepared to kind of wait and sit out the pandemic than rather than trying to extract profit out of the situation and that's what the big difference is. I mean these businesses may have a better survival rate but are they necessarily more productive than a lot of PLC? Yes the Employee Ownership Association has just done some research which shows that the employee owned and worker cooperatives are 8% more productive, the resilient the productive and the other thing is they provide the economics of security so cooperatives will employ seven times more people on average than other businesses again it's because the needs are driven by the workers, the customers as opposed to that profit gain. But do they necessarily work on a larger scale? I mean we've seen for example the co-op came close to collapse a decade ago because of a lack of access to capital it's a real issue now for the John Lewis partnership. It is a real issue and that's why we're calling on all political parties ahead of the general election to put the growth of these businesses in their economic strategy it's worth 87 billion to the UK when you combine there's only 9 000 businesses that are generating that 87 billion and it's just 1% of all business types so actually if we enable some of that legislative changes the ability to raise finance and actually help these businesses that keep the money in the UK will all be better off for it. But how do you get access to finance if you're a mutual and you're trying to scale up? Well this is a real issue because private finance in particular are looking for those returns are looking for that financial return on investment there are investors that will be looking for a social return on investment as well but a lot of the legislation stops that and doesn't enable that opportunity so the economic secretary to the treasury last year announced a law commission review and there's lots of legislative reviews taking place to say how can you raise finance as a mutual or a cooperative because they really are good for the UK economy. But and well to answer that question how do they? Well this is there's going to be a lot of detail in there to work through but for example one of the mechanisms that is available to cooperatives and community benefit societies which is called community shares and it's like crowdfunding Ian but you get to own a little bit of the business because it's a co-op an example there is you're limited to only be able to contribute £100,000. Now you speak earlier talking about tech you know you need way more than £100,000 to develop a tech cooperative which are growing by the way so this is a real core issue that you've touched on there raising capital is one of our asks for government. Okay Rose got to leave it there I'm afraid good to see you this afternoon. Thank you for having us. I should say this afternoon it's still the morning just about isn't it thanks for joining me. That's it from me for the time being