Shops to Close

Universal Business Team, the business consultancy at the heart of the Plymouth Brethren have announced that they will be closing the brethren retail arm Campus & Co.

The announcement was made on Monday 28th July 2025, in a series of webinars to brethren households across the globe. Campus & Co consists of 240+ community retail stores for the use of brethren members only. Initially set up to assist in raising funds for the brethren education system, OneSchool Global.

The announcement was met with great excitement by many insiders who have been unpaid volunteers within the Campus & Co business. At Brethren Exposed we are not surprised by the change of direction, our calculations below show that if the Voluntary staff had been paid, it would have been operating at a significant loss.

According to the Campus & Co website, the business was operating 247 stores globally, with over 9,000 volunteers giving 120,000 hours of their time each month. 

If an average full time employee works 40 hours a month, then the running of Campus & Co required around 700 employees. We have analysed some of the accounts for the UK Education Trusts that manage the Campus & Co stores in the UK, we also have the overall sales data for Australia.

Based on these numbers we estimate that Campus & Co had global sales somewhere between £60 million - 75 million annually, with an estimated profit in the region of £10 million to £15 million. In effect the brethren members donated their time at a value of between £7 - £10 per hour. If the volunteers had been paid even a basic wage of just £12 per hour, then Campus & Co would have been losing millions each year! 

How will the funding gap of £10 million to £15 million for OneSchool Global be replaced? We have received a couple of suggestions. One is that the short armed Hales family could put their hands in their long pockets, secondly the Vision Fund could charge market commercial interest rates on their business loans to brethren companies! We would consider the first highly unlikely, and though the second would more than cover the funding gap, we again doubt this option will be exercised.

The announcement still leaves many other questions including, what will happens to the properties where the stores are located? Will brethren members who lease property to Campus & Co be compensated? What will the Sisters do with their spare time? Will we see a series of fire sales to sell off the stock? What will happen to the UBT employees who run the Campus & Co business? Will we see more non-brethren employees made redundant?

Following on from the closure of UBT Accountants in Australia and the change of ownership to UBT Accountants in New Zealand (which is literally now owned by one sole trader!), the question must be asked if church CEO Bruce Hales has lost both his business touch and the control of his flock?