Posted by cooperatoby in EU, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, procurement, social enterprise
Conclusions of the PASE project’s seminar “Public procurement and public social partnerships – The prospects for social enterprises and the reform of EU rules”, held in Forest/Vorst, Brussels, on 26th October 2011.
by Toby Johnson, moderator
The seminar has looked at two contrasting regional approaches to increasing the involvement of social enterprises in the delivery of public services. Marche’s approach is via legislation to facilitate contracting to social co-operatives, while in Flanders the approach is more pragmatic – working within the current rules rather than seeking to change them. We have also heard what the European federal bodies have to say about the reform of public procurement legislation that is under way. The chief point is that when you are dealing with social services, quality needs to pay a much more important role in purchasing decisions. The good news is that the Commission seems to have taken this on board. Whist we are unlikely to see the “cheapest offer” criterion abolished, we can expect more quality-oriented techniques to be used much more widely.
Build capacity of social enterprises
We need to take a businesslike approach. Firstly this involves collaborating pragmatically with partners from the private sector. This might be through sub-contracting or it might be through engaging in trilateral negotiations between the public, private and social enterprise sectors to define the best niches to expand into.
Secondly, evidence from both Italy and Flanders shows that a promising method is to focus on key business ideas – for instance social care of bicycle hire and repair. The technique of social franchising enables you to develop the business idea centrally and then roll it out across an entire country.
In some countries there is the fear that social enterprises might be used as a ‘Trojan horse’ to blaze the trail for the handing over of public services to private companies, but in many areas the contracts concerned offer so little profit that this is not an issue. In any case social enterprises are typically offering new and innovative services, not taking over existing ones.
Improve awareness among public authorities
National authorities need to build up knowledge centres. Some national websites are setting an example, such as Europa Decentraal (http://www.europadecentraal.nl) in the Netherlands.
As quality of service delivery is difficult to measure in advance, the accreditation of potential suppliers is a more realistic approach. As part of the Better Future for the Social Economy (BFSE) network, a learning network of ESF Managing authorities led by Poland, Lombardy has developed a tool for measuring the social added value of social enterprises. It is currently being piloted, and can be downloaded from: http://socialeconomy.pl/x/616186?projekt=531302.
Influence attitudes
The fourth of the project’s four areas of intervention should not, I think, be targeted so much at changing the attitudes of the general public – that’s too broad and slow a job – but of challenging vested interests. Not only existing suppliers but procurement officials. They don’t want to be given the job of judging imponderables like quality or jobs created, and they don’t want the risk of having their call for tenders challenged or cancelled for being unfair. They are quite naturally risk-averse. We need to make procurement officers life easy for them – not more difficult. Training courses have already been delivered in Britain and Sweden, and as the project has identified, more are needed.
We can also seek to influence the profession by working through the national professional institutions of procurement (see list at http://www.cips.org/en/aboutcips/Global-Partners-Links/).
Lobbying is needed, and much of this has to be local and national. Flanders offers a very clear case of this, where the social partners in the construction sector have so far succeeded in excluding social enterprises from bidding for contracts worth over €135,000 by denying them certification on the grounds that they constitute unfair competition. But the EU level is important in setting the tone, and there is certainly an appetite among decision-makers for bringing procurement to bear to address social problems.
Follow-up
PASE has also identified three follow-up actions that should be taken, and is researching ways to implement them:
1. An annual school for public-social partnership
2. Action plans using TSR (territorial social responsibility) and TQS (territorial quality standards)
3. An online self-assessment tool
PASE project: http://www.pase-project.eu
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Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative.
Tags: co-operative, infographics, Suma
I was delighted to find that my old co-op Suma is now the country’s 52st biggest (by turnover, £26m) according to the Co-operatives UK Top 100 . I was even happier that it gets a mention in David McCandless’s amazing new book of infographics, The Visual Miscellaneum. It is on page 183 on the Organic Food Market, where it is relegated to footnote status by corporations like Philip Morris, Dean Foods (who?) and Heinz. There’s still some way to go before we take over the world, then.
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Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative.
Tags: co-operative, social enterprise
I was just drawn to register with the Social Enterprise Live website, in order to protest at the cheek of Peter Holbrook, relatively recently-appointed CEO of the Social Enterprise Coalition, who seems to think that all co-operatives have to be recategorised as social enterprises, as if the set of principles that has survived wars hot and cold worldwide for a century and half is suddenly inapplicable.
http://www.socialenterpriselive.com/section/news/public-services/20100223/dont-get-hung-governance-says-holbrook#comment-453
Public services have to be controlled by the public and the mere market relation of buyer to seller doesn’t cut the mustard. They have to be publicly owned. That’s what co-ops are designed to do – deliver a common benefit under democratic control. Sometimes it’s best to keep things simple – if you want to control it, it is best to own it.
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Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative, EU, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, energy, EU, finance
Michael Stephenson at the EP on 1 Dec 09
With 29 MPs, the
Co-operative Party is the 4th-largest party at Westminster. (It is by the way the only co-operative party in the world, apart from the Cooperative NATCCO Network Party, which holds one seat in the Philippine House of Representatives). It was founded in 1917 and has had a Brussels branch since 1982. On 1st December its General Secretary, Michael Stephenson, came to the European Parliament to talk to us. And unwittingly we seem to have held the first meeting the Parliament has hosted on the subject of co-operatives for about 10 years.
He pointed to a renaissance of co-operativism in Britain; in the last decade NHS foundation trusts, co-operative trust schools and football supporter’s trusts have all brought consumer co-operation into new fields. Even the village shop in Ambridge is organising a community share issue! Two areas where a start has been made but much remains to be done are housing and energy.
The financial crisis has shown the strength of mutualism in housing finance – they tend not to freeze credit, they charge lower interest rates, and their structure is intrinsically more stable. Yet, incredibly, the city establishment seems locked in to its unsustainable greed-based model. Till now, the public seems to have naively retained its faith in the esoteric knowledge that financiers claim to have. But at last polls are showing that the RBS directors’ attempt at blackmail to preserve bonuses may be the straw that has broken the camel’s back. It may mark the downfall of the Tory claims to be the party of the poor.
In energy, a cluster of co-operative wind farms like
Westmill shows that ethical investors are keen to do their bit against climate change, and the movment is running a well-thought-out campaign on climate change,
ACT!.
The meeting chimed well with an initiative of
Co-operatives Europe to launch a
Network of Co-operative MEPs, whose first meeting takes place in Strasbourg on 14th December, part of a campaign to raise the co-operative movement’s profile in European politics. Two coming opportunities are the EU2020 consultation and the inaugural hearings of the new Commissioners.
Co-operatives have a unique political offer. They are in the lead on a number of issues with which the public engages, such as fair trade and climate change, but they haven’t got the best out of the system. The movement’s job is to put together the narrative and the evidence to create the impact they deserve to have. Right now the Labour Party is receptive to new ideas – so there is a real chance that co-operative solutions will be taken up.
Posted by cooperatoby in EU, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, EU, social economy, social innovation
Reflections on the EESC seminar of 22nd October 2009
The European Economic and Social Committee held a seminar on 22nd October 2009 on the subject Getting to the End of the Tunnel: Creating the Right Environment for the Social Economy.
Social innovation was on the agenda and one of the speakers was Matteo Bonifacio from the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), the Commission’s think tank on future policy that has taken over from the Future Studies Unit.
He noted that, today, economic and social challenges are becoming indistinguishable. This poses policy makers with a question: social issues can be addressed either as a separate complement to economic policy, or by viewing the two as inseparable. You can view the social economy as “the enterprises that do the rest” – what business enterprises don’t do – or you can take the view that all enterprises have a social responsibility. In other words, he posed the distinction between targeted policy – things like prizes and incubators for social entrepreneurs – and mainstreaming – making “social” a key word in all policies that make up the post-Lisbon strategy.
A number of Commission DGs are working on social innovation, and BEPA had held a seminar on the subject on 19-20 January 2009. A report will be published probably in February 2010, after consultation throughout the Commission.
Speaking from the floor, I argued two points:
1. Mainstreaming can go too far
The social economy, by definition, combines private and public resources. The main public source of financial support for its development has in practice been the European Social Fund (ESF). Its high point has been EQUAL, which had a €3 bn budget over 6 years. The social economy was the 3rd most popular theme, with 424 development partnerships in 18 member states accounting for about 9% of that sum.
The problem is that now EQUAL is over, there is now no Community Initiative in the ESF, and the momentum and visibility that had been built up has been lost. Where is the follow-up?
What has survived is a seven-country learning network led by Poland, which is part of the Learning for Change programme, and is designed to build the capacity of the public administrations and key stakeholders to manage the ESF better. The Better Future for the Social Economy (BFSE) network addresses the key European issues for the social economy – public procurement, impact measurement, state aid, SSGIs, finance and social franchising. But it has a relatively small budget – about half a million euros.
It’s not true that all has been lost – the Swedish and Spanish examples presented at the conference show that progress is still being made – but work on the ground is now fragmented and incoherent. The social economy and inclusive entrepreneurship is explicitly mentioned in about 30% of the 117 new ESF operational programmes but it’s very difficult to get an overview of what’s happening. The “brain” of the innovation system in the ESF has been disconnected.
So, the policy of transferring the learning of EQUAL into the mainstream ESF seems to have backfired. There is still an important place for targeted policy, especially where innovation is concerned.
2. The social economy as social innovator
Mr Bonifacio wondered whether the distinction between the social economy and CSR was negligible. I think it is very far from that. The BEPA seminar on social innovation did include “citizen” representatives from the Social Platform (for instance from the European Anti-Poverty Network), and it did include individual examples of social economy initiatives (such as San Patrignano). But it did not include the social economy as an organised sector or movement, and this is symptomatic of what seems to be a persistent blind spot in EU policy.
Social innovation is about meeting people’s needs in new ways, and in order to do that it needs to connect with citizens and find out what those changing needs are. This relies on stimulating the participation of citizens. And it is the social economy that is the way of organising citizen participation in the economy. Therefore, the social economy must be involved in systematic efforts to promote social innovation. To overlook this means that you waste the capacity of the social economy to network, to spread new ideas and transfer expertise. It is folly to ignore the strength of the social economy as a mutual support system.
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Posted by cooperatoby in beer, cooperative.
Tags: beer, co-operative
Amazing to see the media industry creating the “reality” it is more conventionally supposed to report on – but this time with a result we can approve of. In February this year, production company TwoFour announced that it would like to film a series about a community saving its own pub. “Twofour will work with the current owners to encourage the local community to muck in and run the pub for one month, with support from our expert landlord and presenter, Jay Smith, who owns a number of successful bars in the north of England. Everyone involved will be trained in all the necessary skills to run their pub,” it said.
And hey presto by September, the inhabitants of Llanarmon-yn-Ial, near Mold, Denbighshire, had bought the Raven and formed a co-operative guarantee company – Raven Mad – to run it.
A TwoFour spokesman quoted in the pub trade newspaper The Morning Advertiser, said: “With so many rural pubs closing around the country, Twofour is delighted to have the opportunity to help save some of them. The precedent of community run pubs has proved successful, and hopefully this show will encourage more to go down this route. We wish The Raven every success.”
After standing empty for three months, the historic pub was auctioned in July, but no one would bid the £250,000 guide price. However Raven Mad has now secured a six-year lease. The pub reopened on 30th August.
Co-operative spokesman Doug Macpherson recognised the encouragement the TV company had given: “The village is one of few remaining with a shop, post office, school and pub. Villagers were very saddened to see the pub close but, like many other communities, felt powerless to do anything about it. The offer from the television company has enabled the community to come together with the support of an experienced mentor to re-open the pub.”
Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, EU, social innovation
Social innovation isn’t a new idea, but it is fashionable, particularly since EU Commission president Barroso has taken up the idea as a rallying cry. It is clear that innovation is far more than developing a new product and bringing it successfully to market, as innovation policy has it. We can’t ignore the far more interesting and difficult realm of the new social relations that are needed to support such new phenomena of consumption.
But what is social innovation? Is it more than another of the periodic rebranding exercises that lay down an every thicker palimpsest of buzzwords: local employment development, community economic development, local development… local employment initiatives, local initiatives for development and employment… corporate social responsibility, social responsibility of enterprises, territorial social responsibility… co-operatives, community co-operatives, community businesses, community enterprises, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship, social businesses, even social business enterprises…
It’s hard to choose among these, so how do we decide which are worth more than the others? It seems we have to go back to first principles. Who benefits and who controls? If social innovation as a process is “the design and implementation of creative ways of meeting social needs” then it is about ways of:
- listening to society as it voices what it needs
- deciding which is the appropriate vehicle to meet those needs, whether through state action, business or community action
- enabling people to act for themselves to meet as many needs as possible
To build new initiatives you need communication networks, that allow messages to circulate efficiently, and joint projects to be built up incrementally. Responsive communication can certainly be helped by new technologies – collaborative tools like wikis and YouTube. But it also relies on structures to put productive activity within the feedback loop, to put citizens in charge of economic activity.
Of all the flavours of participative democracy, it is co-operativism that has consistently, for 114 years or more, provided this bedrock. It delivers economic and social benefits to people whom it values as individuals. That’s why social innovation should have a large component of co-operativism, and the co-operative movement should give its all to promote social innovation.
