Co-operatives and mutuals were given prominence in the Coalition Agreement as a means of transforming the way public services are delivered. This reflected an existing direction of travel for Government policy; the previous Labour Government had directed and encouraged the establishment of NHS Foundation Trusts and co-operative trust schools and all three major parties had expressed enthusiasm for cooperative and mutual structures in their manifestos.

How can the Government best develop a policy strategy to implement the Coalition’s commitment to promote mutuals?

The Group accepts that the Coalition Government has been in power for just over a year and so there are limitations to how easily one can gauge their success in promoting mutuality over such a limited period of time.  However, from the evidence given to the Inquiry, it is clear that the Government has not yet developed a clear strategy to promote mutuals.

The Inquiry found that the Government appears to have concentrated its policy efforts on encouraging the development of new mutuals to provide public services rather than to support the existing financial mutual sector.

Mutuals Yearbook 2011

The current economic and political imperative is to promote ways of organising finance, risk, public service and enterprise, that are both dynamic and responsible at the same time. For a while, ‘social enterprise’ appeared to offer a third way, between state and market; today, we’re told that it is the ‘Big Society’.

Regulators and policy-makers are seeking principles via which to distinguish the ‘socially useful’ parts of the private sector, from those which seek only to inflate private earnings as fast as possible. Mutualism adds much-needed clarity to all of this, by offering well understood, viable organisational structures, that are entirely alien to both Whitehall and the deal-makers in the City.