Robert Owen set out to make the “dark, satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution less terrible places. While early industrialists tended to exploit their workers, Owen promoted social reform and believed that capitalism could only prosper if practiced with a human face.

Although growing rich on their profits, the mill owners were also responsible for truly appalling working conditions. Their duty to cloth, house and educate their young workforces went largely unfulfilled.

Owen was born at Newtown in Montgomeryshire and started work aged 9 in a local haberdashers. After becoming an apprentice draper he settled in Manchester, then the very epicentre of social and economic change.

A revolution was underway in textile production and Owen threw himself into it, initially manufacturing spinning machines and later buying a cotton mill.

A sales trip to Glasgow introduced him to David Dale and his daughter Caroline, whom he later married. In 1799 Owen and his business partners purchased Dale’s New Lanark mill.

At New Lanark, Owen quickly set about putting his beliefs into practice. He shortened the working day, increased the minimum working age and set out to improve the workers living conditions, including the opening of a shop whose profits were re-cycled. A similar community was later created at New Harmony in the United States.

This experience laid the foundations for the co-operative movement and foreshadowed the idea of a “stakeholder society”. There is also a direct connection between his concept of the model community and the post war New Towns programme.

From the co-operative movement also stemmed the concept of Trade Unions. Owen was involved in the early unions although – with his mill owners’ hat on perhaps- he did not believe in strikes.

Owens ideas were many generations ahead of their time. They continue to inform the thinking of everyone who believes that people are more important than profit.