Ian Fraser

Occupation: Retired

Co-operative Businesses traded with in last 12 months Food and Electrical

Skills and experience

I want 1. Greater access to elected members. Email addresses, regular local or online meetings etc. 2. Elected members more free to discuss policies with members. 3. A radical new Coop policy for plastic and other waste. 4. To make supporting community Co-op’s a priority. I have many years of experience as a elected Co-op member. I have the ability and the time. Please vote 1 for me. Thanks.

Additional information

We have had many changes and a great many improvements to our Co-op since the dark days of a few years ago. We need an active, accessible and innovative Members’ Council. I have long experience at this level of work. I have strong ideas to improve access to elected members. We need to be more radical in our ideas. More ideas should come from members. We need less of a Manchester led approach and more of a member led approach to our local communities.

I would like to see a return to grass roots community involvement. We support many good charities. But then again, so do our competitors. We should make the Co-op difference by supporting and creating local Co-op’s. Local people working together in the spirit of self-help and solidarity. There are so many ideas there and it is expanding all the time. We need to get much more involved. We should be leading the Co-op movement at local level.

We should be leading the field in our approach to plastic and food waste. We should be reintroducing a deposit scheme to return bottles, cans and glass. Where we can’t do it in store because of space, we should be doing in our communities. There are already moves by the Scottish Government to introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme. We should do much more than the minimum and once again lead the field as we clearly did with Fairtrade.

I would like to see the regular Members’ Council meetings being more free to discuss new ideas and to demand reports of the progress of its many innovations. It needs to be stronger and more assertive. We need the ability to report back to members and to access the very people who elected us. We need to publish contact details of council members and arrange meetings between them and their constituents. We could easily use social media to do that cheaply and easily. The Council itself should publish regular details of what it has done and is doing.

There is a wide gap between the decision making in Manchester and the workers in our shops, warehouses and funeral establishments. We need much closer links between us all. Scotland has such a wide range of businesses. They range from small stores all over Scotland to large stores which are the main suppliers in isolated communities on islands. We have a huge distribution centre at Newhouse. We have funeral establishments doing a superb and sometimes difficult job in diverse areas. We have a unique situation compared to elsewhere. Scotland needs its own regular meetings and easy communication between elected members, local communities and representatives of our businesses.

So I ask that you vote for me. I firmly support members and colleagues and hope to be able to represent them again. The Members’ Council should represent the business owners, the members, and be active doing so. Please put the number 1 against my name. Thank you.