Co-operative News

TSB is the part of the Lloyds Banking Group that the Co-operative Bank would have bought, had Project Verde not gone all wrong. Instead, Lloyds has listed TSB as a separate company and is selling it off in tranches.  Ironically, there is now growing market speculation that TSB will acquire the Co-operative Bank.  Project Verde, […]

This is an incredibly tough time for retailing, especially grocery retailing. The coming period will be difficult for independent co-operative societies, for the Group and the many other co-operative food retailers, especially those in urban areas.   The largest UK grocery retailer is Tesco – and it has just reported its worst trading figures in

Ireland has one of the world’s largest credit union sectors, per capita. While the movement is perceived to have been around for generations, the first credit union in the Irish Republic was actually started in 1956.  Its roots were firmly in a co-operative movement, with co-operatives established in Dublin to promote jobs and economic activity.

After months of bad news stories, the disclosure that the Co-operative Bank made a £1.3bn loss in 2013 – following a loss of £674m in 2012 – was no surprise at all.   Speaking personally, the biggest shock was delivered last month, when we learnt that an additional £400m in capital will be required. This

I once read a short story by Leo Tolstoy called How Much Land Does a Man Need?. You might guess the principle behind the story from the title. But to spell it out, a man was told he could have as much land as he could walk around in a circumference in one day. As

Anyone who reads this column regularly will have been unsurprised to read that the Co-operative Group is considering the sale of the pharmacy business, as well as moving towards practical measures to dispose of the farm operations.  Private papers that indicated as much were revealed to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee and have

This is a period of substantial transition not just for the Co-operative Bank, but also for the Co-operative Group.  Not the least of this – though it has passed with surprisingly little comment – is the de facto move of decision-making from Manchester to London.  Group directors and senior executives are now based in St

One of my guilty pleasures is that I like watching crime dramas.  I don’t want to see the blood and guts, but there is the pleasure of working out who was the guilty party.  In real life there is often more than one guilty person – not just the individual who carried out the awful

I was contacted recently by a close observer of the Co-operative Bank’s affairs, who suggested I had missed a dimension to the crisis at the Bank.  Over the longer term, my contact argued, profits had just been too low.  As a result of this suggestion, I have spent hours wading through the financial results not

Sir Christopher Kelly’s review into the crisis at The Co-operative Bank began in September.  While that review is conducted in private, it is becoming clearer to outsiders what the review should consider.  Much of that will overlap with the Treasury Select Committee’s enquiry into the collapse of the Project Verde deal, which has increasingly focused

It can be very useful to revisit history to work out what went wrong and why – not least to prevent repeating past mistakes.  This is perhaps a good moment to reflect on the Butterfill Act, otherwise known as the Building Societies (Funding) and Mutual Societies (Transfers) Act 2007.  This was the legislation that enabled

Farewell to 2013 – and may our sector never have a year as bad again please.  Events for the UK’s co-operative movement have been dominated by the crisis at The Co-operative Bank and the knock-on effects on the Co-operative Group.  As news gradually emerged, confidence ebbed with questions raised about governance and how co-operatives can