Today, as Liz Truss becomes the new Conservative leader and the next Prime Minister, she will be entering 10 Downing Street during one of the most challenging periods of our recent history.

With people across the UK are scared about the future to come, it’s clear business as usual simply isn’t working. Without a radical change of direction, the winter ahead will be bleak for families, businesses, and our country as a whole.

We know our movement can provide solutions to many of the challenges we face. That’s why today we’re calling on the new Prime Minister to deliver on these co-operative priorities.

Tackle the energy crisis for households and business

We need urgent action to prevent households and businesses facing unpayable bills come October – but that can only be the beginning. Future-looking actions must include reforming the ownership of our energy system at every level, supercharging retrofitting to make our homes and businesses more energy efficient and creating hundreds of thousands of new owners of community energy generation schemes so that our country benefits from fair and clean energy production.

Address the cost-of-living crisis

Too many families are already struggling to make ends meet. As well as addressing the effects of the energy crisis on households, the Prime Minister must address the wider cost of living crisis. There must be more support for co-operative and community-based measures to deliver food justice, increasing emergency support such as the Household Support Fund.

Unleash the co-operative economy

We know that co-operatives represent a fairer, more resilient way of doing business – especially in turbulent economic times. The new Prime Minister must unleash that potential by doubling the size of the co-operative economy. This could be achieved by establishing new co-operative development capacity, reforming legislation holding co-operatives back, and creating new capital raising instruments for co-operatives and new mutual guarantee societies to support SME lending.

Back community power and ownership

Communities are being held back from tackling inequality, generating and keeping wealth locally, and taking ownership of the places, spaces and decisions that matter to then. We must better enable community ownership, increase local co-operative development, institute a local buy-out fund, and devolve “levelling up” funding streams so that communities don’t need to go cap in hand to Westminster.

Create a fairer financial system

With a potential recession looming, there has never been a more important time to make our financial system fairer. This must involve steps to protect vulnerable consumers such as tackling exploitative ‘buy now, pay later’ providers by facilitating the growth of not-for-profit micro-loan providers and facilitating the growth of credit unions by extending the common bond, and a duty to provide access to cash. We must ensure the wider financial system reflects our values too, from supporting the development of regional banks to ensuring huge multinational businesses pay their fair share of tax.

Our movement and Party are alive with ideas which will give our country a better future. Over the coming months and years, we must campaign for these priorities and the movement we represent with even more zeal and energy. Only by working together can we make a difference.