In early February I had the great opportunity and privilege to visit Margaret Elliot of Sunderland Home Care (Care & Share Associates) who has contributed a piece elsewhere on this site. But i wanted to see at first hand what is rapidly becoming the most cited example of cooperative success in Britain.

The most important thing to know from the start is that whilst they started as a coop, their structure changed 8 years ago to give shares to members. With coops you can pay bonuses, but everyone only gets one share. As an ‘employee owned organisation’, they have set up an Employee Benefit Trust share Incentive Plan which means they don’t have to pay corporate tax. A useful source of information is www.employeeownership.co.uk which has a publication by Dave Wheatcroft explaining how it works.

Other social enterprises and charities as well as private companies are their competitors.

Sunderland Home Care have 17 office staff (those liaising with the council and project managers) with a total of 310 including all the Home Care Workers. The criteria for a fair way of issuing shares was initially of length of service and how much you earn. You could get a maximum of up to £15K in shares. It is now based on salary and how long you work, but the cap is still there and the remainder goes into the company. An elected board of directors decides how much goes into the Employee Benefit Trust which holds the shares. If you leave the company you have to give up your shares and cash them in.

There is an internal share market each year on one day in June where they can trade and buy and sell with the stipulation that you can’t sell more than you can buy. It takes 5 years for the shares to mature and you pay no tax and no National Insurance on them. This is a tax efficient way of rewarding your employees; each year Customs and Revenue, with the company’s account determine the value of the shares. This has ranged from £1.90 to £6.60. At all times the Turst needs to won 5% of the shares.

Although the core business is personal care at home, there are other areas they are involved in: providing support workers to support disabled students at school or university (this is contracted out by the local educational authority) and as mentors in the classroom to help students with learning disabilities, as well as private domestic service, shopping, laundry and housework.

The support workers ‘scribe’ if a student is unwell and can’t attend lectures and the provision can be anywhere from 6 hours a week support to almost 24 hours (where care workers will stay overnight).

One of the most innovative things they have been involved with is something called Independent Futures set up with health and adult services to work with those being discharged from long stay institutions. Personally selected teams move into hospital units alongside health workers til the person feels confident enough to move out. Margaret Elliott’s theory is that everyone needs somewhere to live, someone to love and somewhere to work, so they have established microenterprises including dogwalking and gardening which the clients can participate in with their support workers. This is very labour intensive and requires about 5 people per person to effectively move people out into the community. There are now 8 people who have achieved this in the Sunderland area.

The Department of Health chose 5 social enterprises to look at the social return on iinvestment over three years, monitoring 40-45 people. The cost at £120K per person meant that £5 million was spent on these 40 people—however, this is cheaper, due to lower costs than it would have been paying health care workers in institutions.

Margaret Elliot sees CASA (which includes Manchester Home Care) as a ‘model through participation’ and the prospect that this could be the ‘democratisation of home care across the nation.’

When the ex director of Social Services for Sunderland became CEO of North Tyneside this meant that the possibility of extending the model across the north increased considerably. So aside from Sunderland, there are now services provided in Newcastle, Manchester and Calderdale. No shares will be awarded until there are surpluses, and the start ups are possible due to the availability of grants, loans and regeneration budgets.

One thing is extremely clear, there is no top heavy management or any sort of rigid hierarchy. The man in Knowsley does business development and finance, and the expert on share ownership is Dave, a former bus driver who was a worker director at Chester buses. Margaret and another colleague, Shaun run the offices and do staff interviewing (they are CQC registered).

Most importantly, the people receiving the care are happy with their carers, who in turn feel valued because they get better money for doing undervalued jobs (such as looking after people with double incontinence) and receiving training and development.

There is no HR department and whilst staff are given information about unions at their induction and Margaret herself is a Unison member, not that many have felt the need to take up membership, largely because their pay and conditions are good. There is a back up agency, Cromer which keeps Margaret and her colleagues up to date on legislation, looks at terms and conditions and updates contracts.

Whilst I was in the office, I saw William and Lisa, who between them manage north and south Sunderland with two supervisors each working under them liaising with families and devising care plans. Many of the male workers are ex-pitmen and shipyard workers who Margaret says demonstrate an especially caring ethos and orientation towards teamwork. William took a call from a carer who had arrived at a man’s house to find him still in bed at noon, with his soiled sheets still not picked up, which William dealt with immediately, definitely handling the nitty gritty of the service. When people are discharged from hospital, William, Lisa and their teams go into action, similarly if someone falls and goes to hospital, that means the carer must be redeployed. Previously, when someone went to hospital they would pay you to keep the case open, now they don’t so care continuity is gone. There is no money for dementia awareness, infection control or nutrition and health training, so Sunderland Home care provides this for its staff anyway. There are 599 people receiving personal and domestic care totalling 3,379 hours per week. Pay rates go up to £7.35 an hour at weekends and unsocial hours, but are normally £6.46 and hour and £3.85 a half hour.

Finally as a socially responsible company they sponsor a local children’s football team, and are very visible in the local community.

Photo: William Miller