Worker co-operatives' plan

Author: BBC - Feb 15, 2010

The Tories have renewed a pledge to give public sector workers the chance to form co-operatives to run services.

Staff of taxpayer-funded services, such as primary school teachers and nurses, would decide how they were run - within certain national standards.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne hailed the policy as "pretty radical".

But the Co-operative Party, which has 30 Labour MPs among its members including schools secretary Ed Balls, called the scheme "clueless".

Conservative leader David Cameron launched the Conservative Co-operative Movement in 2007, insisting that such groups embodied core Conservative values, and it was time to reclaim them from the political Left.

At the weekend, he urged Labour supporters to keep an "open mind" about backing his party at the general election, and declared that the Tories were very much on the "centre ground".

Mr Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme handing control of public services to the people who run them would be "as big a transfer of power to working people since the sale of council house homes in the 1980s".