As a concerned, indeed very concerned member of The Cooperative Group I thought it would be a good idea to get in touch with the elected members in my area. (Declaring involvement: I took part in the last elections and came almost last!). You can see on the website quite easily who they are:
and click on the link and you get their ‘election manifesto’. There are no email or other links.
So I write to the membership department at The Cooperative Group who respond:
” Sorry I can’t provide personal details of elected members to you”.
A more helpful response confirming the problem from The Cooperative Party (not The Cooperative Group, and the party that the current ‘Group consultation’ seems to want to stop supporting):
” Hi Peter, Thank you for wishing to raise issue with the Co-operative Group Committee in your area. Your (sic) right tho, it is difficult to contact them direct. The elected reps don’t put their personal details on the web.”
Ok, so perhaps we could crowdsource this. A couple of my locals are fairly easy to identify: Sylvia Jones, lists her email on the web as sylviajjones@hotmail.com; David Smith is almost certainly david_smith45@tiscali.co.uk.
If you can, without breaking any confidence or the Data Protection Act, add to the list, please share below. Then write to them. Of course, if you are in another region … well get cracking and post here or email me. If I get enough information for the UK I’ll create a new page and a list!
Reclaim The Cooperative Group for its members 
The reply from Membership is particularly sad to read. Most elected members would I am sure be happy to be able to be contacted direct, and to see that facilitated with pretty easy technology such as email addresses and so on. However, it is the policy of The Co-operative not to give out contact details even where elected members are happy for them to do so. In the South East region, where I am an elected member, the team have been very supportive of trials of social media as one way, as well as their own Facebook and Twitter accounts. The South London AC tries to get information out there via @CoopVoice and we have toyed with a blog too.
But to put it simply, elected members are not allowed to contact members and the public can’t know our contact details. This is really unsatisfactory.
Thank you very much for your comment.
It seems that the membership department of The Cooperative Group is more concerned with ‘managing’ membership than developing it as a democratic function.
On the one hand the election process is hedged with prohibitions – no canvassing is one!- and once elected the area committee members are hidden from view, uncontactable and barred by their agreement from speaking publicly outside severely constrained guidelines. It’s as though the membership support system is more about control than democracy.
For example; when did I last receive access to minutes of regional board meetings; or details of ‘real’ as opposed to pr staged, food promotional events? Never.
The democratic deficit is huge. And just as the commercial management of The Cooperative Group needs addressing, so does its democratic (?) structures. At the moment we have the worst of all worlds, a non-democratic structure that inhibits involvement and good governance of the business, and a seemingly out of control business.
Not good.