October 2023

Today in our series meeting friends from the first fifty years of ICOF, we speak to Kevin Lloyd-Evans. Kevin joined us in 2022 and is our Lending and Relationships Manager 

I first came across ICOF in 2015. ICOF provided back-office support to Big Issue Invest where I started in social investment. There was an excellent relationship with the respective lending teams for sourcing and completing investment opportunities.  My first impression was positive. The ICOF approach to lending was straight forward, open, and effective. What I liked about ICOF was the lending staff knew their purpose and they had a clear sense of mission.

Joining ICOF has given me the opportunity to learn more about its history, clients, and the wider Cooperative Movement. When I first joined ICOF Bruce Wood, a trustee at the time, summed up the challenge with my role “lend the money out and don’t lose any!” This philosophy and approach are important to ICOF. It has been a key factor in its longevity. My predecessor Ian Rothwell called it Financial Stewardship. During our hand over period Ian impressed upon me two things – using capital carefully with risk balanced and secondly not being afraid of supporting the Cooperative Movement particularly the development of Worker Cooperatives. The lending role at ICOF is not without challenge, however it is extremely rewarding on a personal level. I work with interesting clients who, in lots of different ways, are trying to make things a little better in their communities or places of work.

The first cooperative I worked with was called Animorph.  It’s a technology Worker Cooperative based in London. It was the kind of loan which often proves challenging at committee stage. I got a hard time! However, I knew it would be a good loan because of the people involved. The people are always the magic ingredient to good loans. We were able to help Animorph with other things not just the finance. We helped them secure a contract, a grant, and a place on a mentoring programme. I think sharing information and offering support can be useful to our clients. Earlier in the year Animorph fully repaid their loan – I often remind the committee about this point.

What I quickly realised when I joined ICOF was the loan book was full of powerful investment stories like Animorph going back many years.  Some of the diversity and success of clients was reflected in my early visits and conversations with Smallaxe (name inspired by a Bob Marley Song), Pink Lane Jazz club, Dunbar Bakery, Hempen, Retrofit and Fourcorners.  Ron Peck, a founding member of Fourcorner’s produced the UK’s first film based in the gay community, Nighthawks. In 1986 Ruhul Amin’s A Kind of English was the first Bangladeshi feature film to be made in England, from Fourcorners.  What I noticed about ICOF was they had lots of brilliant stories, but a lot of the good work went unnoticed. That’s what is good about the 50^th publicity campaign it is bringing these successes into focus.

Part of the challenge is that ICOF is a small organisation and always has been. However, I think ICOF has served the cooperative sector well. Doing something well is better than doing something poorly on a bigger scale. Scaling up badly is not a good idea. I personally like the niche nature of what we do. Ian Taylor talked about E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and I tend to agree. What did and does have a big impact on ICOF is the changing nature of the Cooperative Movement.

The first important date to learn when joining the Cooperative Movement is 1844 – the start of the Rochdale Pioneers. The second most important date is 1769 the start of the Fenwick Weavers Society in Scotland. Whichever date started (a Scots/English tussle!) the Cooperative Movement it did so a long time ago.  The changes in the Cooperative Movement have had an impact on ICOF in the past 50 years.  During my time at ICOF, I have listened to a lot of people talk about cooperative development – its decline, competition with social enterprise and possible rebirth.  At events people talked about Mondragon in Spain and the Marcora Law in Italy meaning that if a company goes into liquidation, the staff get the first chance to buy the business. Positive support by government seems to be an important factor for the future of cooperative development. I think whatever direction the Cooperative Movement takes in the future legislative support is needed to help build the Movement.

ICOF has a proud history as part of that Movement, it continues to make finance available to groups that use it to positively impact on people, environment, and communities. That is a good thing. It makes my job enjoyable and full of learning.  My favourite author is Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, Money, Home Dues) he says humans dominate over other species not because of intelligence, strength, or ingenuity rather our ability to be cooperative at scale.  That is quite an endorsement for the Cooperative Movement. According to Yuval, modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years which bodes well for ICOF and its future!

In our interview series exploring memories from our fifty years so far, today we’re talking to Tim Blanc. Tim is one of the founder members of Bristol based Essential Trading Cooperative and has been an ICOF Trustee

“I’ve been with Essential  for over 40 years and I was a Trustee director of ICOF for many years alongside that, including as Treasurer. I actually trained Alain to do the finance work at Essential!

I first met ICOF when I was Chair of Avon and Bristol Co-op Finance limited (ABCF), which was a loan fund for coops around Bristol. ABCF’s lending was not sustainable, so I, as Chair, persuaded my ABCF co-directors – who were mainly Bristol City Councillors and local co-ops – to gift the fund over to ICOF, where it could be better utilised. Part of the deal was that I should join the ICOF Board to make sure the money was well looked after and it’s still sitting there being used!

From an Essential perspective, we’ve borrowed a number of chunks of loan finance from ICOF over the years, These have included £50,000 for a cold store, £77,000 for bagging machines and manufacturing kit, £82,000 for a refit, racking, and a £150,000 mortgage deposit to buy one of the warehouse units that we currently own.

During the pandemic, we had a huge boom when panic buying set in. We had around eight weeks of Christmas levels of trading. And then things took a dip last year. Ironically, this year, even with the cost of living crisis, we’re actually having a very strong year. We’re lucky insofar as our home trading patch includes some quite wealthy areas – those people are still buying their organic produce from us. Our shops in Bristol & Bath are recovering from the pandemic, which is great – though we’re still feeling the impact of Brexit. It completely killed all of our exports to Europe – not because we’re not skilled! We can happily export to Singapore or to the Middle East, but we can’t export to the EU – we trade a lot with Italy, Germany, Holland, France and Spain, importing from them and we used to export across the EU. But now we’re not allowed to do that as you can’t have stuff coming from the UK and back out with EU origins on it.

Right now, our business is in a strong place.  We’ve paid off all our loans and have a strong cash balance, as well as owning two buildings – we’re not borrowing money now. But if we were to want to borrow money again, I’m sure we would look at ICOF –  borrowing from ICOF would always be preferable to a bank loan. We always went to ICOF rather than our current account provider because they’re part of the co-operative movement.

Happy birthday ICOF.  Fifty years later, so many co-ops, democratic community enterprises & employee owed business supported. And there is still plenty of cash to lend to co-ops, even with the recessions & financial crisis of the turbulent UK marketplace.  Well done.  This is true co-operative sustainability.  Roll on another 50 years of lending & support !!!

In our series interviewing our friends from the last fifty years, today we meet Andy Love. Andy was a Trustee from 1993 to 2022 and was the PLC shareholders representative on the board for most of this time.

“In many ways, I’ve been a lifelong co-operator. I’ve been involved in various sectors of the Movement over many years. Some of my earliest involvement was with retail cooperatives – the shops on the high street. Much of my early involvement was in a London context.

When Ken Livingstone was elected as London’s Mayor, one of the first steps he took was to set up an organisation called the London Co-operative Enterprise Board. It was a revolving loan fund, very much like ICOF, but with a regional, London specific remit. I was asked to become a trustee of that Board and when they broke up, some years later, I worked closely with ICOF to ensure the remaining funds were retained within the co-operative sector

In the late 80’s, ICOF launched its second ethical share offer – known as the PLC. I was heavily involved in trying to ensure that it was a success not only because we needed it to be a success in its own right, raising as it did a million pounds. But this had to be achieved against the backdrop of the demutualisation mania – selling off ownership of our Building Societies, the savings of which built up over many generations of members would be squandered. We had to make the argument for investing in our Movement not disinvesting as happened in far too many cases.  It was touch and go but we are still here giving the Banks a good run for their money!

For some years I had been living in North London and was working with local Co-op development agencies and many other linked organisations including worker co-operators. Through those contacts I was able to get to know them much better.  When it was suggested that I consider becoming a Trustee of ICOF, one of the obstacles that I faced was that I’d never had direct experience of working within a worker cooperative. To resolve this issue I was invited to stand as the PLC shareholders representative. I already had a personal investment in the PLC, so that cleared the decks and I became a trustee in 1992.  But for how long I remained a trustee is a source of some dispute!

In 1997, I was elected as a member of parliament. That brought new responsibilities which were inevitably going to take up all of my time and I suggested that the Board should look into electing a new representative at the next AGM. For a variety of reasons, that didn’t happen. Whether you subscribe to the idea that I was such a good trustee that the Board couldn’t afford to lose me, or perhaps more accurately that having an MP on the front cover of the annual report looked good. For the first few years I explained the omission as ICOF having granted me extended leave. But that had worn very thin by the time I left Parliament eighteen years later!

When I first joined ICOF, I was struck by the different culture and the different ways in which people thought about the problems they faced. Retail coops are individual shops where members can purchase food and other goods and services. They’re part of regional and national co-operatives competing with the likes of Tesco’s and Asda.  So they wear their cooperative principles rather lightly compared to worker cooperatives, where all members are expected to play a role in the business. There’s little sympathy for the idea of the worker member ‘just’ being an employee.  Coming from a retail cooperative background, I found this unusual, but I came to appreciate the benefits.

Co-operators should cooperate with each other, but often they don’t. Some of it is to do with culture and values. When looking back its important to reflect on what we got right and what we got wrong, I’ve taken the view over the years that a particular danger is an obsession with structures to the exclusion of like-minded organisations.

I would like to see social ownership companies being taken seriously as part of the wider movement. This should strengthen the sector and bring fresh energy into the cooperative movement There is an urgent need for improved education amongst co-operators. This should, initially, take the form of a lively debate on the future of the Co-operative Movement.

Happy Birthday ICOF. Who would believe that you would still be here, offering a wide range of services to the workers democratic movement in this country? It’s a great pleasure and honour for me to be asked to contribute to this anthology of reflections.  I have always felt at home in your movement; you have kept me abreast of developments when I wasn’t able to play a full part in your deliberations. And you continue to argue the case for why we need democracy in business in this country. Long may you continue to do so. Long may you prosper and grow, and long may you be relevant to the members you represent and the businesses that you support. It’s been a notable 50 years. Let’s make the next 50 even better.”