Expert commentary
“Corporate Sustainability has become just too comfortable a notion over the last few years. It needs more edge, more grit, more challenge. And that’s what The Co-operative gives us.”
Jonathon Porritt
I get a lot out of reading this report every year – even though it makes me work harder than any other report I have to read! And the principal reason for that is simple: The Co-operative “is an organisation that is owned not by investor shareholders, but by over six million consumer members”.
That just puts a different stamp on things. With the best will in the world, a conventional plc turning over more than £13bn (as The Co-operative does) can hardly conceal the fact that their shareholders come first, and that all other ‘stakeholders’ come a long way down the pecking order.
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself (depending on how intelligently those plcs interpret the interests of their shareholders over time), but it does make for some pretty anaemic ‘stakeholder engagement strategies’. With The Co-operative, it’s rather more full-blooded. For instance, its Board has decided that it will commit 4% of pre-tax profits for community investments. That’s four times as much as most of the best performing plcs.
It isn’t just that The Co-operative has an interesting mission (“to be the UK’s most socially responsible business”), but that it interprets this in terms of ‘building a better society’. How many plcs today set out to do that? Not just to improve people’s lives through better products and services, but explicitly to help make the world a better place.
After 35 years of doing this stuff, I’ve come to the conclusion that most companies’ interpretation of ‘Corporate Responsibility’ is completely vacuous – and one of the principal reasons why so many people are now deeply sceptical about the role of business in society.
So The Co-operative’s ‘most critical stakeholder group’ is its members – numbering over six million today, with an ambition of getting to 20 million by 2020. All members have an opportunity to get involved if they want to, and from a conventional corporate perspective, the governance systems required to make that possible must all look pretty geeky – with seven regional boards, 48 area committees, a Member Engagement Index and so on. There is of course a cost involved in this, but the real value to The Co-operative as a whole is enormous.
Interestingly, The Co-operative is more upfront than most companies about the fact that sustainability does sometimes cost money rather than save money. It’s not all whizzy ‘win-wins’ – good for the business and good for the world. For instance, take a look at the stuff on financial inclusion helping credit unions, providing banking services for deprived communities, or bank accounts for prisoners. Almost by definition, margins on these products are going to be lower than margins on mainstream products, and sometimes they don’t make any money at all.
This is all bread and butter stuff for The Co-operative. But 2011 will, I suspect, be even more special with the launch of the new Ethical Operating Plan in February at which I had the privilege of speaking. There’s no other Plan quite like this, not least because of the 47 commitments on which the Plan is based, but because it is driven primarily by the idea of fairness and social justice – and too many companies today pay lip service to that side of the wider sustainability agenda.
And sometimes that means you have to make a few enemies. The last of the 17 Sections covered in this Report is on Public Policy, which isn’t just about what The Co-operative is lobbying the politicians on, but the campaigns it is engaged in around issues as diverse as the tar sands in Canada, votes at 16, on Third World debt, or the use of neo-nicotinoids in farming today. A just and sustainable world is a world that has to be fought for; it won’t just happen of its own accord.
Corporate Sustainability has become just too comfortable and reassuring a notion over the last few years. It needs more edge, more grit, more challenge about what it is that is still going so badly wrong in the world today. And that’s what The Co-operative gives us.
Jonathon Porritt
Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future www.forumforthefuture.org.uk.