Spending Review 2025: Our ask for co-operatives and mutuals

In challenging circumstances, government should use co-operative growth to help deliver on its priorities: growth, living standards, affordable housing, community resilience, social cohesion, food security, public service reform and net zero.  

Legislation and policy change can achieve a lot. And co-operatives are great at mobilising social capital and private wealth to make things happen. Even so, a small proportion of public money, strategically invested, will make all the difference.  

In our submission to the Spending Review, we recommend allocating £39m to £49m over three years, for co-operative business support, enterprise finance interventions and training. This would fund local and national business support provision, building on successful programmes like Business Support for Co-ops. It would also fund action by the British Business Bank and social investment wholesalers, to enable co-operative capital raising, building on successes like Community Shares Booster Fund.  

We don’t expect the Spending Review to contain this level of detail, not least because a lot of business support funding will be spent locally, by new strategic authorities. But we hope to see statements of policy on 11 June, confirming that a proportionate amount of funding will be used in ways that cater to co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprise.  

This week’s confirmation that £87.5m of Dormant Assets funding will be allocated to the Community Enterprise Growth Plan, is a promising sign that social investment will play a greater role in co-operative and community business.  

Beyond this, we hope to see hundreds of millions made available for community energy projects, via Great British Energy, so that more of us have a stake and say in net zero. We will also be looking out for new community ownership funding, to accompany the planned Community Right to Buy legislation. And we hope to see signs that government’s house building plans utilise co-operative and community-led solutions.  

Given new research shows that co-operatives and mutuals not only make an outsized contribution to GDP growth, but do so while simultaneously paying higher wages, enhancing wellbeing and building community wealth, this would all be money well-spent.