Section

New Mutuals

Over the last ten years or so, new mutuals have been established in a wide range of community business and public service areas.

They share common governance features with long established mutuals from the co-operative and financial services sectors. Most importantly, they have emerged from the same roots as their forebears: organisations established by communities to serve communities.

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Mutual Housing - Transferring Ownership

Nic Bliss, Charlie Baker, Cliff Mills, Mike Gaskell and Malcolm Temple

The advantages of a mutual approach to large-scale housing stock transfers, through which local authorities divest themselves of their social housing stock are discussed in Transferring Ownership – Community Empowerment in Social Housing.

Mutuo’s Housing Community Mutual provides extensive opportunities for tenant control and community empowerment resulting from a stock transfer programme. Under the model, ownership of local authority housing stock would be transferred to a tenant centred organisation, rather than a traditional registered social landlord such as a Housing Association. Unlike the majority of Housing Associations, the Community Mutual will give tenants a constitutional stake in the management and ownership of their housing.

The model is based on a belief that increasing the empowerment of tenants and the wider community will deliver better quality management, more cohesive communities and increased opportunities, especially for people who are traditionally without power.

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Public Service Reform - Building the Mutual State

Ed Mayo and Henrietta Moore

Mutual hospitals, non-profit schools and co-operative housing are the future for public services according to this pamphlet, the outcome of six months testing and debate on the web-based think-tank www.themutualstate.org.

Community-based services, including health, childcare, residential care, housing, leisure, crime prevention and education are ideally suited to mutual forms of governance, with the involvement of different stakeholders including employees, government and customers varying according to the nature of the service. The defining ideal is local public services designed and delivered by local stakeholders, offering accountability, flexibility and value for money.

The report calls on Government selectively to free up frontline public services, starting with health, education and local authority services to operate as independent social enterprises supported by the state rather than running them as arms of government.

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New deals for leaseholders

Ray Walker & Nick Raynsford MP

There are more than 1 million leaseholders of flats in the UK. Few home-buyers realise the fact, but the leasehold system is in fact a form of tenancy that gives flat owners very little control over the buildings in which they live.

In New Deals for Leaseholders Ray Walker and Nick Raynsford MP advocate the use of residents management committees (RMCs) in supporting leaseholders with their property rights. The Government now proposes to create a new right for the leaseholders in a block of flats to take over the management of communal facilities in their block, or to buy the freehold from the landlord. But more needs to be done to enable leaseholders to work together.

While welcoming Government initiatives in this area, New Deals for Leaseholders examines in detail the issues facing the tens of thousands of leaseholders who have already taken over the collective management of their blocks of flats (there are already 43,000 residents’ management committees, RMCs, in the UK). It assesses the impact that the Government’s Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill should have in promoting a major expansion in this largely unrecognised form of mutualism, and suggests how the legislation could be improved to ensure that all leaseholders get a better deal.