Heart of England Co-operative Society
independent consumer co-operative in the United Kingdom
Heart of England Co-operative Society Limited is an independent consumer co-operative in the United Kingdom. Based in Coventry, the Society trades in the English counties of West Midlands, Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.
Registered under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014, the Society is a member of Co-operatives UK (formerly the Co-operative Union), the Co-operative Group (formerly Co-operative Wholesale Society) and its national buying scheme, the Federal Retail Trading Services.
For the financial year ending 19 January 2019, turnover (excluding VAT) was £74.2m (£71.7m 2017/18) and operating profit was £2.9m (£5.5m 2017/18). The Society had no external bank borrowings and a £4.3m pension deficit (£8.4m 2017/18). The Society declared a £342k staff dividend (£376k 2017/18) and did not declare a member dividend or dividend bonus during the year. Heart of England Co-op had 137,500 active members in 2018.
Each Heart of England Board Director is subject to re-election every three years by the full membership. The Co-operatives UK 'Code of Best Practice' also recommends a term-limit of six years for the Chair, but the current Board of the Society have waived this, as they 'believe that the individual elected annually (by Board Directors) should be judged on merit and should not be restricted to a pre-set maximum term'.
History
The Heart of England Co-operative Society originates from the Lockhurst Lane Industrial Co-operative Society founded by ribbon makers in the parish of Foleshill, Coventry in 1832.
The public source identifies “Heart of England Co-operative Society” as independent consumer co-operative in the United Kingdom. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Heart, England and Co-operative.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5692254. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2019, 2017 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heart of England Co-operative Society” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.