EC Meeting July 2022

6.2 The Hotel Directors have met regularly to remain on top of developments and assist management in raising standards.

6.3 Hotel Accounts have been approved by the Directors. These are attached for reference.

6.4

Business forecasts remain positive.

6.5 A letter has been sent to 70 or so agricultural colleges to see if anyone might be interested in assisting us to create a garden project to supply vegetables for the hotel and perhaps an educational project. A meeting with our project manager and potential architect has been held. 6.6 A meeting has been held with the project manager to consider the position of the £104k retention figure which will only be paid to the contractor once all work is complete. 6.7 Our lawyers have submitted a good response to Royal Sun Alliance in relation to our insurance claim and have strongly rebutted all of the points made by RSA. We intend to hasten RSA’s response to us and pursue this rigorously. 6.8 Inevitably cost increases are absolutely shocking and we are having to look at every area of income and expenditure and our own costing policies at the hotel. 6.9 The Unions using the hotel this year are: ASLEF BFAWU COMMUNITY COPOD CSP FBU GMB HCSA NAHT NAPO NEU (provisional) NHBC PDA POA TSSA UNISON UNITE URTU The Co operative Society are also booked in. I think we can be proud of this list and thank the unions concerned. 7.1 Thanks to the good offices of Aegis the union which is based in Scotland we were able to work with a Scottish government funded body Social Enterprise Scotland to draw down funds to enable them to prepare materials for the appointment of a development officer with the Trust. They will also work on future funding strategies. 7.2 Margaret Bennett a Trustee is an experienced accountant and has provided training for the Trustees on accounts. 7.3 I pursued our long outstanding complaint to the Financial Services Ombudsman to get a return of our £93 from Lloyds bank deposited there in a cyber-crime. The response was astounding. Cutting a long story short they apologised for failing to tell us four years ago that they could not deal with our claim as our charity is too big. They referred us to the Business Banking Resolution Service. Fortunately we are not out of time and our claim has been fully submitted and acknowledged by the BBRS. I will continue to pursue this. Every autumn we undertake a review of all of our organisational procedures and policies. Responsibility for this has fallen in the past to the F&GP. The disadvantage of this is that not all EC members may be aware of our policies which is not an ideal situation for a governing body . I suggest therefore that I forward our main policies to all EC members, invite amendments and comment and the F&GP considers these and brings proposals to the November EC. 8 Internal organisation and reviews. 7 Education Trust.

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