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  • Lead Member Oldham Council
  • Participating Members Anthony Collins Solicitors, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), Oldham Council, Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, Wigan Council
  • Year 2025
  • Status Policy Labs

Principles met

  • Co-production

    We will develop systems that enable citizens to be equal partners in designing and commissioning public services and in determining the use of public resources.

  • Enterprise and social economy

    We will promote community-based approaches to economic development that focus on supporting the creation of jobs, social enterprises and other businesses and providing an environment for co-operative and mutual enterprises to thrive.

  • Innovation

    We will embrace innovation in how we work with local communities to drive positive change.

  • Learning

    We will capture and ‘expand’ the experience and learning from individual projects and approaches in order to encourage broader application of co-operative principles within individual member Councils and across the Network.

  • Maximising social value

    We will support the development of a framework and criteria for social value, giving substance to the concept and supporting Councils with the tools to ensure better local social and economic outcomes.

About the project

As the title of this Policy Lab might imply, we currently don’t really have a “Cooperative Economy” in the UK: we have lots of co‑operatives operating mainly as islands within an otherwise competitive and largely profit-driven economy, where their influence is marginal.

We understand the term “Cooperative Economy” to denote something different from the mainstream economy. It is where people and organisations work together in a way which is guided by some shared values and principles which challenge the traditional competitive and financially driven approach. But it has to exist within the mainstream economy, and over time to influence it.

The ultimate aim is the happiness and wellbeing of all, not the private benefit of some. More specifically, it means people and organisations conducting their affairs differently, with everybody in mind, including future generations. Seeking to register lots of new cooperatives has (crudely) been the approach of recent years; it hasn’t worked. The desired outcome needs a different approach.

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