How was the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives for you and your organisation?
What a wonderful coincidence that 2025 UN International Year of Co-operatives was also the year in which we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the first known building society, by landlord Richard Ketley in a pub in Birmingham in 1775. We marked that double celebration by bringing together over 1,500 delegates for our anniversary conference in Birmingham back in May. We re-created the Golden Cross Inn and commissioned the wonderful co-operative Heskett Newmarket Brewery to create for us the Ketley’s Golden Cross celebration ale. In partnership with the European Association of Co-operative Banks, we welcomed visitors from across the globe. Principle 6 in action!
The celebrations of 2025 also gave us the opportunity to showcase the building society sector in all four of our national parliaments, with receptions at Holyrood, Stormont, the Senedd and Westminster. Our mutuality campaign ran in parallel across the year, emphasising the £7.2bn GDP contribution the sector makes, our 29% share of the UK mortgage market, and 37% share of first time buyer lending (that’s 123,000 first time buyers), 760,000 first-time savers, our 35% of high street presence and the £4bn that we have returned to members in households and communities across every part of the UK – £4bn that in the retail banking sector would have gone to external shareholders.
What are your hopes for 2026?
Personally, as I move on from 12 years leading the BSA, perhaps a little more balance between work and everything else. But importantly, I hope to continue contributing to the wider co-operative and mutual sector. I am delighted recently to have been appointed as a trustee of Plunkett UK.
For building societies, credit unions and the wider mutual and co-operative sector, the momentum we have started creating in support of the government’s commitment to doubling the size of the whole sector needs to gather pace. There is a huge opportunity for the government to bring that commitment to the heart of policy making across so many sectors, building our UK society from community upwards in housing, energy, education, agriculture, care and even utilities. In genuine partnership, there is so much we could achieve and 2026 should be the year in which we move from policy formulation to delivery.
I remain hugely ambitious for the whole sector. The future can be co-operative and mutual if we want it to be. But it won’t happen if we don’t make it so.
