It’s Community Energy Fortnight, so let’s dig into a bit of history, because it’s also, handily, a nice teaser for our next share offer.
You’ll have seen OVESCO written about in two halves: OVESCO CIC, the team on the ground installing, managing and maintaining solar arrays, plus giving out energy advice to help households decarbonise and catching people before they fall into fuel poverty. And Ovesco Ltd, a Community Benefit Society (CBS), which exists so we can run share offers and keep the whole operation community-owned. That second bit sounds dry. It absolutely isn’t. Here’s why.
It started with 28 people and a shop
Rewind to 1844. The Industrial Revolution had made a handful of people very rich and left a lot of working people short of affordable food, credit or housing. In Rochdale, 28 textile workers had had enough and decided to do something about it themselves: they each chipped in a small amount of money and opened a shop selling honest food at fair prices, owned and run by its own members.
They called themselves the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, and the rules they wrote down became legendary: one member, one vote, open to anyone, only a limited return on capital, and any surplus shared fairly or ploughed back in. These Rochdale Principles spread across the globe and are still the backbone of the co-operative movement today.
From corner shop to community-owned power
Parliament clearly liked what it saw, and gave the model legal teeth with the first Industrial and Provident Societies Act in 1852. Over the next 150-odd years that legislation got refined again and again, eventually splitting into two flavours: co-operative societies, run for their members, and community benefit societies, run for the benefit of the wider community.
That second one is us. Ovesco Ltd is a Community Benefit Society, and it’s a brilliant fit for community energy: any surplus gets reinvested for public benefit rather than paid out to maximise private profit, everyone gets one vote regardless of how much they’ve invested, and local people can put in relatively modest sums and become genuine, democratic owners of the renewable energy in their community.
The same model that bankrolled a shop in Rochdale has since funded village shops, pubs, affordable housing, community sports facilities, and, closer to home, community-owned solar. The old “Industrial and Provident Society” label was retired in 2014, but the idea it protected hasn’t dated a day: keep the ownership local, keep the benefit local, and let people have a real say.
Nick Rouse, Director at OVESCO, installing community funded solar on the rooftop of Burgess Hill Academy
So next time we launch a share offer, you’ll know it’s not some flashy new investment gimmick. It’s a nearly 200-year-old idea that still works brilliantly, and you can be part of it.
Sources: Co-operative Heritage Trust, Law Commission