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Government shows support for employee ownership

03/07/2012

By Daniel Hunter

Action to knock down the barriers stopping British businesses from becoming employee-owned was announced by Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg and Minister for Employment Relations, Norman Lamb today (Wednesday).

Speaking at a summit at the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Deputy Prime Minister confirmed Government will act on recommendations put forward in the final report from the Nuttall Review of Employee Ownership.

Graeme Nuttall was commissioned by the Deputy Prime Minister in January 2012 to examine how to promote employee ownership in the private sector and spread the benefits into the wider economy

Responding to the Review today, Nick Clegg announced:

· An independent and expert Institute for Employee Ownership will be established to provide information and advice to: managers and employees; lawyers and accountants; business schools, researchers and Ministers. This will be a professional body, offering accreditation to its members. Founding members will include the Employee Ownership Association, Baxi Partnership, Prospects and Co-operatives UK.

· A call for evidence on how a Right to Request employee ownership could work will be launched this week. This will examine what the minimum number of employees needed to make a request should be; what fair grounds for turning a request down could be; whether requests should be allowed at any time and, crucially, whether the best way to achieve this is through a new statutory right or another mechanism. Government will report back in the autumn.

· New off-the-shelf ‘DIY packs’ for companies covering legal, tax and other regulatory considerations, to help companies adopt employee owned business models quickly and easily. This will help combat the perception that employee ownership is too difficult, time-consuming and expensive compared to more traditional routes.

“Employee-owned firms have lower levels of absenteeism, higher productivity and growth rates and smaller gaps between the pay at the top and ordinary workers,"... continued on page two >

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