As one of the UK's largest social enterprise childcare service providers, we know the many advantages our co-operative governance model offers us. A consumer-owned co-operative business like ours is about delivering a range of long-term social goals while ensuring our financial health is maintained.
The Community Interest Companies legal form has its strengths but none that cannot, in our view, be more effectively delivered by a parent, worker or multi-stakeholder co-operative business.
A new project launched recently by Co-operatives UK, the body that represents the UK's 12bn co-operative movement, is aimed at promoting our legal form to existing and future childcare settings. Our research shows that many local authorities and childcare development partnerships are keen to know more once we tell them what we do, how and why we do it.
We welcome the NDNA's interest in our area of the 'private' sector, an area which for too long in the UK has been ignored.
Neil Homer, general manager, Imagine Co-operative Childcare
