UKH

Further cost saving measure that is really scraping the bottom of the barrel as the costs are minimal. 

Meanwhile still not had the requested breakdown back from the CEO to fact check the real cost of GB Climbing…

Do you mean real life area meetings in pubs etc have been abolished?

Yes. For the rest of the year it’s online only.

Did you really expect a complete and accurate response from the CEO. It was obvious from his words, facial expression and body language that the complete answers would never come. It was a classic delaying tactic and it is working!

Was it? I got the impression that he was trying to be reasonably open with us but got caught out on some figures he should have had prepared and didn't.

It's disappointing that the figures have not been forthcoming so far.

He was displaying obvious signs of avoidance (Ask your local detective or car salesman about how to read people!) He put on the pretence of being caught out, as a means of escaping from crucial facts which would have been very unwelcome in the meeting.

That is why I interjected with my 'poor communication' comments. It made him even more uncomfortable and easier to read!

He had the numbers but only wanted to give the ones he wanted out in the general arena!

I got that impression too but if I remember correctly they were promised "next day", as they did exist but just weren't to-hand. 

How much do area meetings cost? My guess would be that the only chargeable thing would be the venue (not that I know how much it is to hire a village hall for an eve). 

A travel ban is a fairly common way of companies saving money, and is almost always a stupid idea.  Business travel is either necessary or it isn't.  If it isn't necessary any time it shouldn't happen (i.e. there should be no jollies) and if it's necessary it should.

don't forget the chips, the most important reason for going :p 

I believe in the past the room hire for the previous venue for the Peak Area Meetings was free, and was repaid in lots of beers being bought at very slow speed as the bar was always under staffed despite the meeting usually ordering sandwiches and chips for 80 people when they were well attended. Chips were always top notch though.

If BMC staff are attending in an official capacity, it would be reasonable that staff time and transport is chargeable.

Worth noting that post covid the costs of renting rooms in pubs etc for meetings have skyrocketed. One of the last ones I organised wanted £400 for the room for the evening. I gather the Peak Area have had similar issues. Its normally possible to find an alternative but I can't see that the next two meetings being online only is a huge deal personally. 

I would go further than that, it would be unreasonable (and possibly in breach of employment contracts) of the organisation not to cover those expenses.

The quality of chips is clearly very important, I have never been disappointed by chips at an area meeting.

The saving on having them online for the rest of the year is somewhere between £2-3k.

I think that is a truly terrible decision. It also proves what I’ve long suspected - that the current board regard Area Meetings as an inconvenient irrelevance.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and the reality is that well run Area Meetings, particularly once they have built momentum and are seeing good attendance levels, are by far the best way the organisation has at connecting with its grass routes membership. By which I mean that part of the membership interested in contributing to the organisation, as opposed to the section of the membership who joined because they had to.  The Area Meetings are also a fertile recruiting ground for volunteers.

As I said, a truly terrible decision.  Whoever came up with the idea should be ashamed of themselves…

Neil

He did publish a Q&A interview* shortly after which included where he got the figures he used in the Peak Area meeting and also disclosed an allocation for shared overheads but was still far from the full and transparent breakdown which I requested in an email.

He replied to my email saying he would be doing another Q&A interview which would include more on costs and I replied to that asking him to confirm whether I will be getting the requested detailed breakdown but not had a response. 

As things stand the disclosed figures for 2022 are that GB Climbing spent £960,000 and received £780,000 in grants and income so the cost to the BMC was £180,000 with a further costs for shared overheads (no detail on how this is calculated) of £80,000 giving a total of £260,000 cost to the BMC to support GBClimbing. On top of this £90,000 was spent to host the World Cup at Ratho which was squirrelled away in the accounts as an investment and not allocated to GBClimbing. Personally I would attribute that to GBC to make a total cost £350k.

Whether that accounts for everything I don’t know as disclosure has been limited. A former Director put the figure at £500k on social media hence my interest in establishing for myself a figure that fairly represented what the BMC put in so Members could appreciate how much resource is being put into GBClimbing. 

*https://www.thebmc.co.uk/ceo-qa
 

Completely agree with all you say, as my perception has always been that  the real work and coal face heavy lifting affecting most of the membership has always been undertaken by volunteers, not the board. You’re an accountant so why not you or somebody else propose an EGM, demand the relevant info. and take them to task on all issues. There’s no dodging that! 

Presumably it's easier and more comfortable to dodge unwelcome questions and limit contributions from attendees in a virtual setting. I mean, if you're in a pub you can't just mute someone who disagrees with you!

The cost savings seem a very weak justification, especially considering the open questions about spending on other areas of the organisation. 

The whole thing indicates that they aren't interested and don't want input from those pesky members. 

They would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for those blasted meddling climbers.

No they haven't been abolished, once again it appears UKC have used a headline to project misinformation.  Any area is welcome to have a face to face meeting, what has been cut until the end of the year is the funding from BMC.  This means members need to find the cost for the venue and any catering themselves, probably for only one more meeting as this cost reduction (which I'm not at all saying I agree with) only runs to the end of this year.

Incorrect, funding isn't available for the rest of the year but face to face meetings can still take place - get your facts straight.

Peak area only (I don't know figures for other areas):

Venue hire: £110

Catering: £140 (typically)

Speaker: £50

I know peak area are looking at ways of reducing this

Can anyone point me to the definitive source for this? There's rather conflicting information in this thread. I'm confused by what Sean said

"Any area is welcome to have a face to face meeting, what has been cut until the end of the year is the funding from BMC.  This means members need to find the cost for the venue and any catering themselves, probably for only one more meeting as this cost reduction (which I'm not at all saying I agree with) only runs to the end of this year."

Wouldn't there need to be some BMC representatives at an area meeting? And surely that's not possible if there is zero funding (because at a minimum their time and travel expenses would need covering)? In which case I don't see how a meeting would be possible, regardless of who pays for venue hire etc.

These are genuine questions by the way and I'd be very interested in the answers - I'm a longtime BMC member but not overly familiar with the area meetings. 

That seems like semantics to me. They have withdrawn funding, and presumably therefore they won't send a BMC officer to any meeting members may happen to organise themselves. The effect is to abolish the meeting. They'll save a few hundred quid nationally for this one round of meetings, whilst managing to annoy the very people who represent them at area level.

Whoever has decided this had made the wrong decision. There are other ways of saving more money within the organisation than this. 

Is it cynical of me to predict that this "one meeting ban" will extend into next year?

Where do you get £140 for two trays of chips and two trays of bread and marge, that the members have to carry across the road to the venue from the local pub?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=811835120424154&set=p.811835120...

That should take you to the screenshot of the email which was sent to, I think, one of the NE area reps, it is part of a thread where there is an ongoing discussion (although following who is responding to what comment is almost impossible as Facebook is a horrendous platform for a long discussion).

It's worth noting that the thread was started by Shark/ Simon Lee, NOT the UKC staff (who have been supportive of the BMC the entire time I have been involved with the organisation).

HI Becky

The wording of the email that was sent states:

"With the current financial constraints on BMC and the consequent actions taken to correct the projected budget deficit, the Board have decided that there will be no funding for Area in person meets for the remainder of 2023.  Whilst the Board recognises the concerns some members may have, even relatively small savings such as this, are necessary to ensure we minimise the deficit and apply parity across the BMC with respect to financial controls.

The Board hopes that the fact that online meetings have been proved successful, albeit with limits, and the success of "free" area meetings trialled in some Areas, will allow Area Chairs to have an effective means to conduct business"

As you can see it does not prohibit face to face meetings, just says that no funding will be available.  In the Peak Area we've had all except one as a hybrid since we started meeting again after Covid restrictions were lifted and I suspect we'll go back to hybrid, however good or bad the connection is at the venue.  And that will be the way BMC attend too.

I asked the question of the area chair, I also suggested to him that the cost of the chips was high.  Based on numbers they apparently get £1 off the cost of a chip buttie if people were to buy them individually.  It was still suggested by others there were cheaper ways to cater, which they are looking into.

Apologies, I wasn't aware of that.  I'm not 100% familiar with how the forum works.  I don't use many of them.  Just that it appears in UKC.  Therefore it's Shark/Simon Lee that isn't 100% accurate.  Unfortunately I can't amend my post as too much time has passed.

I’ll have you know I’m approximately right 100% of the time.  

Those taxis aren't going to pay for themselves! 

Brilliant

From the guidance: https://www.thebmc.co.uk/Handlers/DownloadHandler.ashx?id=2114 the bottom of page 9 states: 

2.7 BMC staff support & attendance

There is a commitment from the BMC office to send a relevant member of staff to all Area Meetings. If a particular BMC officer is requested to attend a particular meeting the office will endeavour to facilitate this. It should be noted that despite our best efforts, there may be occasions when it is not possible to identify an officer to attend an Area Meeting.

So no, there isn't a need for some BMC rep.  Having said that, if we do run a hybrid meeting then a BMC Rep is likely to attend I suspect.

Your seem to have once again read A and concluded B? Bizarre. 

Right, so now the BMC members are supposed to have their own meetings independent of the BMC, without representation from the BMC, organised without involvement from the BMC? And they're going to be called..... what exactly? 

What gets decided at these meetings?? If their decisions are agreed and acted upon, and carried out by volunteers there present, you're gonna have to help me out with what's left that the BMC is for.

Within the BMC there are a number of people who just like meetings, minutes of meetings, meetings about governance etc. A splinter organisation such as described above could satisfy this need without actually aiming to achieve anything else at all. It could be called the British Meetings Club, or BMC. 

If the BMC could have a few years where it just gets on with doing the operational stuff and good governance can be taken as given by the members that would be fantastic, unfortunately there have been seemingly constant navel gazing discussions about governance for at least 6 and a half years.

In other news, I've decided to hold my own Olympic Games. There's no involvement from the IOC so you'll have to chip in for stadium hire, and any medals and titles won't be official, but I'm sure no-one will have any issues with that.

See you all at Bosherston 2024

🔵⚫🔴

🟡🟢

I'm a big believer in 'in person ' meetings, but what is the attendance these days in all areas. Some folks on here are huge advocates of numbers so let's have some details of numbers attending area meetings, and not just Peak District meetings, or meetings where something controversial is on the agenda. 

But if the big bosses want to cut out these meetings they do have a responsibility to compensate  by improving communications.

John

I am now at the point that no matter what the members want, or what is discussed either in in-person meetings or in various on-line forums, the board is going to do just as it pleases.

As a pro-BMC person for many years I am thinking that I need to re-appraise my belief in the organisation!

A sad sad situation!

I would assume a board member involved in this has these to hand?

Surely if making a decision like this they will have reviewed all thes figures to look at the impact of this balanced against the cost cutting.

Hopefully!

is there a link to this announcement from BMC??

There hasn't been a formal announcement, an email went out from Kate Anwyl (a BMC staff member whose job title I can't remember currently) to the Area reps, something posted about it on Facebook last night (I have posted a link in one of the two threads ongoing on the subject).

cheers, could you post it here? will take me days to find through the other threads?

Here is Andy Syme President and Director apologising for poor communication last time* which ‘didn’t meet member expectations’. The Board have apologised before for poor communication but apologies m ring hollow when nothing is done about it.

Communication is an issue but it’s not the issue. This is just the latest in a succession of poor decisions and mismanagement like making cuts to the Access team, basing budgets on ludicrous member growth projections, having insurance go offline during the peak booking period and letting management play fast and loose with spending and growth on GBClimbing.
 

* youtube.com/watch?v=YNxaqKM7MhY&

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2241207952632038/permalink/6435507993201992...

If you re-write that in block capitals, it sounds just like Trump.  I think it's the exclamation marks.

If costs need to be cut then this seems like a sensible option, my work has been conference call based for 10 years and it works well, that’s without having video and with significant language barriers among attendees. 
If anything this should be done anyway, having people travel an hour or two to attend a meeting is both bad for the environment and disenfranchising. There’s plenty of reasons to be giving the BMC management a hard time, this is not one of them.

I'm not quite sure that a 'conference call' is adequate to deal with the variety of issues raised at Area meetings and to give people, often not regular attendees, a sense that they actually belong to a community. 

It has been suggested that a 'National Area' be constituted expressly for those who can't get to Area meetings or who prefer a 'virtual' contact. That has some value.

"Having people travel an hour or two to attend a meeting is both bad for the environment and disenfranchising." As is having to travel to a crag...😉

I have long argued for smaller areas, or a national constituency to help people who move around a lot (contractors and the like), the shift to hybrid and online has lessened the need for this.

Online can make it feel a bit more top down than it feels in person in large meetings I have found (I don't think that online only AGMs are great places to discuss contentious topics for instance.

Someone posted a series of questions about how to get involved and try to understand this stuff and the post had disappeared before I posted my response, but answers here anyway:

The website is pretty unhelpful in how it is structured, usually easier to find stuff using Google as your entry point rather than directly visiting the website. If you want to see the future of the website look at the hillwalking bit as that is the intention going forward. Useless if you want to understand an ongoing discussion though as it's not set up for that. If people refer to the "articles", these are essentially the rules of how the BMC is structured and how people are appointed/ elected to various positions.

Area meetings and AGMs are the main point of interaction between grass roots members and the organisation where a 2 way dialogue is expected.

It's all pretty opaque for volunteers as well, I am on tech Committee and the governance stuff mostly seems to emerge on here and on the "BMC Watch" Facebook group. I had no idea all of this was going to kick off until it did and I have been involved for 8 years. There are a few individuals either with vendettas against the BMC, or who resent paying for membership but are required to by the clubs they are part of, you will figure out who they are if you poke your head in often enough.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask, although possibly do so in a different thread to try and keep this one on topic (as much as is possible with a thread about the BMC). I would however say that the BMC is far more than shouting and moaning about governance and I have found some of the stuff I have been involved in quite interesting/ enjoyable (tree planting, nerdy discussions about equipment safety) and I have made some friends as well, although I would say that if you don't have a specialist area of interest (technical committee, inclusion, medical stuff etc) aligned with the BMC's work that involvement with a local club, helping out with odd jobs at huts and climbing with new members (experienced and not) is likely more rewarding and flexible than involvement in the BMC's governance structures. 

Interesting that you have ignored: "It should be noted that despite our best efforts, there may be occasions when it is not possible to identify an officer to attend an Area Meeting."

How's that relevant? This isn't best efforts to identify an officer. It's no efforts at all to send one.

It's because you're wilfully misrepresenting what the clause says. Let's look at the whole clause then. 

In simple terms it says that BMC rep is required, where possible/relevant they'll try to send a specific person who has been requested, and it's possible that despite trying to send a rep it may not always be possible (e.g. if all of the potential options are off sick / on holiday / other).

That very obviously does not equal your conclusion of "no, there isn't a need for some BMC rep".

I really don't understand your contributions on this post, you seem to be representing/defending the BMC in some way but are doing far more harm than good.

It would be useful if you could lay out your stance e.g. 'I think this is a proportionate and reasonable cost to cut, in relation to other spending and cuts at the BMC, because X'. 

If I was senior at the BMC and aware, I would be getting you to stop ASAP!

(edited due to unwilful misuse of the quote function) 

I do not believe that I am wilfully misrepresenting what the clause says, that certainly isn’t my intension and I am sorry that you feel I am. 

I still believe that the part of the clause saying that “there may be occasions when it is not possible to identify an officer to attend an Area Meeting” means that sometimes there won’t be a BMC rep attending.  I’m struggling to understand how that can be interpreted differently.  I concluded from this one sentence that “there isn’t a need for some BMC Rep” (which reading back I see is not good English).  I stand by this conclusion, though I could have worded it better, and it isn’t obvious at all to me that it could mean something else.  It is a get out clause that allows meetings to still take place even if a BMC Rep isn’t there.

My intent within this feed/post was to clarify what I saw as misrepresentation of the facts.  Previous contributors stating that face to face meetings are abolished is incorrect, the funding for them has been abolished, yes (and to add my personal stance on this, I think that is an error on the BMC’s part).

Can face to face meetings take place, yes.  There’s just no BMC money (and you could argue members money as member subscriptions make up around 60% of the BMC income I believe (I may be out on the %)) to pay the expenses associated with face to face meetings to the end of the year.

Meetings, however they occur, are important for the members to air their opinions / views and give feedback to the Members Council Reps for these to be taken back and put to the BMC.  I interpreted the clause, when it refers to BMC Rep, as meaning a Board or staff member, not the area elected Members Council Reps.  However, these Reps can and do feed back whether a BMC Rep is present or not.

In my opinion, the clear difference is between 'has the intention to send a rep but it's not possible for X reason (illness etc.)' (the BMC rules) vs 'no intention of sending a rep' (current reality).

In terms of holding an unofficial meeting and what the point of this would be, this poster put it best - https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/crag_access/in_person_bmc_area_meetings_c...

The only thing which would be unofficial about it would be the venue.

A BMC rep could attend remotely (I believe this is the intention anyway?), you would still have the access team participating, Members Council reps will be participating etc etc. It would be a normal meeting aside from someone (or possibly more than one person) present having contributed to the hire of the room. It's no different to when a group of colleagues attending an online meeting decide to sit in a meeting room together to do so, other than the exchange of money to support this.

It's a ridiculous situation which I disagree with, but Long Suffering Rope Holder has significantly misrepresented it.

Personally I don't think that beer is necessary for these meetings and that schools/ universities in appropriate locations should be approached for an evening room booking with the support of student mountaineering clubs on the understanding that the room will be left clear and in a good condition if a dust pan and brush/ hoover are left for us. The BMC needs to be more accessible to younger people, meetings in Bamford and Grindleford or similar places do not contribute to this.

TL : DR The BMC has said it's not funding in person local area meetings.  But if members want to go ahead and arrange meetings and fund them with their own money that's fine.  To which they may or may not send a rep.

So what they're saying is they're not banning climbers from meeting up with other climbers and having conversations.  How awfully kind of them.

But what is discussed in those unofficial, ad hoc meetings will carry no weight with the BMC or have any influence on what they do. In fact, as far as the BMC is concerned, they may as well not have occurred. 

It could be argued that the Board are treating area meetings with exactly that disdain anyway, which is a disgrace.

From an entirely personal perspective, I'm in favour of the meetings being online - I attend to represent my club, but it is a considerable distance to travel. However, those meetings need to be official and carry weight with the BMC decision-makers.

Why? All of the relevant people will still participate and take feedback to the next Members Council meeting, the meeting is no less legitimate if a group of people have independently decided to sit together in a room. If my girlfriend were a member and we participated from my living room the meeting would still be legitimate, if we had a couple of friends from my local club over it would be legitimate, if a group of club members participated from the hut it would still be legitimate, if an open invite for members of the area was issued it would still be a legitimate meeting would it not?

People consistently misrepresent the BMC, either through misunderstanding or malice (a small minority), it makes it more difficult to understand what is going on and reduces the likelihood of a meaningful and constructive solution being reached.

An independent meeting held in your living room isn't being conducted under the auspices of the BMC, so the BMC is entirely at liberty to ignore whatever comes from it. Any feedback from the session that you describe would fall into the "ad hoc comments" box rather than official findings from a legitimate meeting. I accept that this is semantics, and would hope that even the ad hoc feedback would help influence the BMC leadership but in reality the acceptance of that feedback would be entirely dependent on whether it is regarded as positive and constructive or goes against the flow.

I hold no malice towards the BMC, I just find myself increasingly bemused by how the organisation manages to lurch from one misstep to another. At the area meetings I have attended I have seen incredibly passionate volunteers who dedicate vast amounts of their time to topics such as access, achieving far more positive results than could ever be expected by professionals in those roles. In the same meetings I hear the feedback from National Council about how most of their last meeting was taken up with whether they they should agree a code of behaviour for their meetings, which seem at best an exercise in navel-gazing at the expense of proper strategic thinking. The time would seem to have been better spent scrutinising the membership targets, and the plan for how they were to be achieved, that underpin the funding decisions.

It's not an independent meeting though. There will be area meetings held online for the next round and these will be supported by the BMC and the appropriate volunteers. If my hypothetical living room group participated the BMC would be at no greater liberty to ignore members of the living room group than they would be any other members participating at the meeting. Members in the room/ online are treated equally during hybrid meetings (other than the pillock waving his arms and making a throat cutting gesture due to an item running over time in the last Peak area meeting as he wouldn't have been visible to the chair if he were participating on Zoom).

I was suggesting that you were misunderstanding the situation, not that you held any malice or were deliberately misrepresenting things. I have likened it to someone standing on a rake only to go and step on another one in Looney Tunes fashion, I agree it's incredibly frustrating!

There was a code of conduct task and finish group created a few years ago,  however I would have hoped that the discussion at National Council (as I think it was back then), consisted of "a small number of members are on occasion behaving in an abusive manner towards staff and volunteers, we need to address this by having a formal code of conduct and disciplinary procedure, do we have volunteers for this piece of work?" rather than a protracted discussion. The governance navel gazing has got me and plenty of other volunteers incredibly frustrated as well. From conversation with Steve Clark (MC rep for rock climbing) the issue of projected membership figures was raised multiple times by different members of council as likely being unrealistic. 

We sent some questions to the BMC on 7 August. Paul has been on leave until this week. We have given the BMC until 12 noon on Monday to respond to those initial questions plus a few more about the area meetings and Bern, otherwise we will publish them unanswered on the site.

I think we've been speaking at crossed-purposes here - if the meeting is an "official" BMC one (i.e communicated via their own channels, chaired and minuted), then I entirely agree that the venue is irrelevant. The point I was making was that "a group of blokes in the pub who all happen to be BMC members, having a chat" scenario would not be regarded as a legitimate meeting upon which the BMC could be expected to base decisions.

No worries - it wasn't being taken an a personal dig. The loony tunes analogy is a good one!

It's refreshing that the volunteers were consistently raising the membership projections as being problematic, but frustrating that the concerns were seemingly ignored by the decision-makers, leading to the current floundering.

Quite likely at cross purposes, what Sean Milner was raising up thread was the idea that a group of members would attend the officially sanctioned and minuted meeting in a venue paid for by a small group of members from their pockets directly rather than via the BMC's coffers while other members would participate from elsewhere. It's likely in this scenario that the staff member would participate remotely to avoid travel costs.

As you rightly point out, a bunch of members chatting in a pub without the formal structure of a meeting and publicisation by the BMC etc would not hold any weight in their decision making.

I do like my analogies, the more absurd the better!

Definitely frustrating that concerns were not acted on sooner, MC and the board need to work together more effectively in future.

Not sure I approve of the distinction between saving money for "the BMC's coffers" and members' pockets. Who's filling those coffers??

If they think it's non-essential enough to make a saving, I'd love to hear someone have a crack at justifying why the saving can't be passed on to the members....

🍿

You can put the popcorn away, they are both members' money, but one is money they have paid with an expectation of things being done in return (and not all of those things are being done), one is money that they probably have planned for other things. I'm not sure about you but I draw a significant distinction between the two? If I've not paid for a service and I would like it I tend to hand over cash, if I've paid for a service and it's not been provided I am highly unlikely to hand over extra money for the service I already paid for (I am aware that this is more a variation of how a service is provided than none provision of said service).

I understand the reasoning (that the BMC lost most of its insurance sales at its busiest time of year due to whatever it was that the underwriters were doing with the insurance and its desire to mitigate the impact on reserves), but I still don't agree that it is a good decision and in an ideal world I would hope that the underwriters address the damage which the timing of their actions caused to the BMC (something which I am unfortunately highly doubtful will happen). Personally I'd argue that long term having in-person area meetings is pretty essential for the BMC, purely from the standpoint of recruiting and supporting volunteers in their roles. 

I have no useful direct contribution to the thread, but I feel it necessary to say that I'm not a BMC member since departing the affiliated club I used to have membership through - and this thread is the reason I won't be a BMC member until such time that they sort their shit out.

Any news??

I've been a double member, as a member of an affiliated club and because we had a family membership (which no longer made much sense now the kids are grown up but I left it in place basically as a donation).  Among the outgoings I've just rationalised on retirement is the family membership, and a contributory factor to ceasing to be quite so generous is that I'm not at all sure I want quite so much of it spent on elite sports administration.