Co-operatives UK on the IPS Consultation

Co-operatives UK have issued a brief indication of their response to the HM Treasury Consultation Document “Growth Through Co-operation” that came out on 26th July and their fuller response to the technical questions is available to download there as well.

Responses are needed to HMT at IPSconsultation@hmtreasury.gsi.gov.uk by 20th September 2013

It’s interesting that the model based  research carried out for Co-operatives UK and cited in their more detailed draft full consultation response  indicates that the new limit for withdrawable share capital needs to increase  to £100,000 to eliminate any disadvantage in the financing and operation of industrial and provident societies from having such a limit at all. The Consultation document gives a £31,000 limit as the amount reached if the present £20,000 is raised in line with inflation. It will be interesting to see what the Government goes for.

The other issues addressed in the consultation are about the availability of insolvency rescue procedures for IPS’s, the introduction of electronic filing of legally required documents with the FCA, the protection of IPS registers from vexatious information requests if the society goes to court to get authorisation to refuse the request, boosted inspection and investigation powers for the FCA and applying Banking Act rescue procedures to credit unions.

All of those issues are very important but the detail is technical. However, the guiding principle on all of them is that societies should be treated in the same way as companies as long as their nature as co-operatives or benefit of the community societies is properly protected by the FCA. Co-operatives UK express that in their fuller response (draft full consultation response).

I offer this brief outline of the main thrust of the consultation proposals for you to download and will make my full legal nerd type response to the Treasury once I’ve finished it, possibly in collaboration with colleagues at DWF LLP

© Ian Snaith 2013 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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