After making forays into the energy sector, Midcounties Co-operative is now entering the childcare and travel business. Andrew Bibby reports.
The Midcounties Co-operative Society's Co-operative Energy is gaining more customers through its single energy tariff offer. It's endorsed by Which? and satisfies David Cameron's call for an end to confusing multiple pricing in the industry. The tariff also makes Co-operative Energy one of the cheapest operators in the market. While most other companies are about to raise energy prices in winter, CE has cut its electricity charges by 2%.
The co-operative had 16,700 energy customers in 2011 - now it has over 80,000. Midcounties chief executive Ben Reid is delighted at the success. "People are coming to us because of the strength of the co-operative brand," he says.
An accountant by training, Reid originally joined the small Ilkeston co-operative in the mid-1980s, moved to the Leicestershire society and then to West Midlands co-operative, where he became chief executive in 1992. The merger of West Midlands with the Oxford, Swindon and Gloucester in 2005 gave him the chance, he says, to shed old cultural attitudes and start with a clean sheet.
Reid stresses Midcounties' desire to promote its co-operative values and says that, among other things, the society tries to achieve this goal by giving all new staff specific induction training in the differences between co-ops and other retailers. A well-trained and committed workforce at shop-floor level is one of the most effective ways of rebuilding Britain's co-operative movement, he says.
Midcounties operates the usual mixture of convenience stores, pharmacies, post offices and funeral operators in its geographical heartlands, which stretch from Shropshire to Oxfordshire (although excluding Birmingham, Coventry and the other Midland areas served by two other independent co-ops, the Midlands and Heart of England). It is this core regional business which contributes most of the £800m turnover and keeps most of the 8,600 staff busy. But Midcounties, more than all the other independent co-operatives, is increasingly becoming more than a 'regional'.
Midcounties is building the Co-operative Childcare, a network of pre-school nurseries which stretches from Newcastle to Poole with particular focus in Greater London. "For many years, people were asking why didn't the coop do childcare? Now we have 51 nurseries. There is real excitement in my boardroom ...," Reid says.
Reid was the chair of the Co-operatives UK 'new ventures' working party which in 2001 specifically suggested that the co-op movement should enter energy provision and childcare. (The panel also suggested a third area, elderly care, a market Midcounties briefly entered but has recently exited). "I think (Midcounties) has been an entrepreneurial society for quite some time. We've done other things, too," Reid says.
Midcounties is also venturing into travel and has set up an embryonic new national co-operative travel business as well as a second brand, cooptravel.co.uk.
Posted by Andrew Bibby
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