The Midcounties Co-operative is one of the largest UK co-operatives and is fully owned by its members. We operate a family of businesses under the Your Co-op brand, which encompasses food retail, travel, childcare, healthcare, funeral, and utilities.  

With over 700,000 members our success is all about building great connections with our customers, member-owners and communities. We employ over 8,400 colleagues and have an annual turnover of over £800 million. 

We operate more than 230 food retail stores in the UK, largely across the West Midlands, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. We also trade nationally through our Co-op Pharmacy, Co-op Travel, Co-op Childcare, Co-op Energy and Phone Co-op businesses, as well as operating a funeralcare business. 

Our co-operative values are at the heart of everything we do, and this means that the decisions we make are driven by our democratically-elected board and we are always informed by our members. 

The last few months have demonstrated how these co-operative values can make a real and tangible difference in bringing people and communities together.  

As a Society we’ve focused on four key areas: 

• Protecting colleagues: with over £1 million invested in PPE , £1.6 million on enhanced pay and benefits to frontline colleagues, and the pay of colleagues furloughed topped up to 100% at a cost of £1.8 million. 

• Helping customers and members: for example, by creating a fund which raised over £40,000 to help critical key workers pay for childcare. 

• Supporting communities: through initiatives such as establishing a home delivery service to ensure that the most vulnerable people in local communities were able to receive food and essentials. Working with 700 community groups we’ve now made over 75,000 home deliveries, and have raised over £40,000 to support local foodbanks. 

We also launched a Community Restart Fund, providing £75,000 to 36 of our charity partners to help them rebuild following the Covid-19 crisis, and we’ve extended the support we give to over 50 charity and community groups by a further year to provide additional support and assurance. 

• Boosting suppliers: knowing of the importance of local suppliers and manufacturers to local communities and economies, Midcounties has increased the number of local suppliers in its food stores and extended the ranges of existing local producers. This has helped businesses, such as Alden’s Butchers in Oxfordshire, survive when many had seen their business decimated when lockdown was introduced.  

We are always looking to the future and campaigning on the issues that matter to our members. The co-op party have been helpful & supportive partners to ourselves and indeed many other Co-operatives over the past few months in particular.  

That help has included supporting our call on the government to help people protect themselves from the potentially harmful effects of the sun by removing VAT from sunscreen products or asking for greater protections for our colleagues and all those in retail by supporting Alex Norris MP’s Bill on Violence against shopworkers. 

We’ve also got a long-standing commitment to helping protect our planet, and through our 1 Change Campaign our encouraging our customers, colleagues and members to make small changes in the way they live their lives which can make a big difference.  

We’re proud to be a partner of the Co-op Party and look forward to continuing to work closely with them to promote and grow the co-operative movement in the UK and across the globe.