The current profile and success of employee ownership is unprecedented. Employee ownership is now being embraced as the most prominent alternative to the over-dominant PLC model.
Employee owned businesses are largely or fully owned by their workforces either through direct employee share holdings or shares held in Trust on behalf of and for the benefit of employees. Their workforces are very actively engaged in the management and development of their businesses. And economic competitiveness and high performance are a central part of the DNA of employee owned companies. The compelling success stories of employee owned businesses such as Clansman, Unipart and Arup demonstrate the very special nature of employee ownership.
More and more politicians, businesses and service commissioners are realising the contribution that employee ownership is making and can make to the growth agenda and to the delivery of world class public services. It is a realisation that employee owned organisations tend to achieve higher productivity, greater levels of innovation, better resilience to economic turbulence and have more fulfilled workers who are less stressed than colleagues in conventionally owned organisations. It is also a recognition that employee ownership works financially as over the last decade and more, investments in shares in employee owned businesses have considerably outperformed those in conventionally owned businesses.
This current interest in employee ownership has been reflected over recent weeks in two important initiatives.
Firstly the Treasury has completed its review into the taxation of employee ownership in the UK. Its conclusions, announced as part of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, are significant. The Autumn Statement argues that employee ownership is an important part of the UK growth agenda and explicitly confirms it as a business model that the Government supports. This is a powerful and unique endorsement of a part of the economy that contributes more than £30bn to UK GDP each year.
The Statement also undertakes to bring to the table the resources and expertise of the Treasury to work with other parts of Government to increase the number of employee owned businesses, to implement a package of simplifications to existing employee share schemes and to keep under review the possibility of introducing at the time of the next Budget further tax incentives to promote employee ownership.
Secondly, Government has accepted in full all of the recommendations for how to grow employee ownership in the UK that are contained in the recently completed Nuttall Review into the barriers to such growth.
The inaugural meeting of the group that is now accountable for the implementation of these recommendations, chaired by the relevant Minister Jo Swinson MP, has just taken place. This development brings a realistic prospect that a new future for employee ownership that many of us have been driving for will arrive. A future in which there is far greater awareness of employee ownership options, there is a simplification of those options and there is better access to finance and advice for businesses that want to implement and or fund employee ownership.
These two reviews, the Treasury and Nuttall Reviews, are ones that the Employee Ownership Association successfully pushed very hard for.
Their outcomes and the attendant commitments mark another important step along the way towards employee ownership becoming a central part of industrial policy, part of the mainstream.
Employee ownership is currently growing at an annual rate of around 10 per cent. Interest in it within business communities and amongst public service commissioners is increasing daily. The number of funders and advisors competent to engage in employee ownership is on the rise. These are exciting times. The challenge ahead is to build on this momentum in pursuit of the big picture – 10 per cent of UK GDP delivered by employee ownership by 2020. With the right will and skill this is perfectly possible.
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