GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

so there is going to be a future for trade unions. Trade unions are specialist.

Therefore, the future means that there has got to be a GFTU. We play, as

other colleagues have said, a unique and important role in the trade union

movement, small though we might think we are. We are absolutely distinctive

to the nature of a specialist trade union movement. So that is one principle,

that we have got to keep this organisation going for future generations when

we are not in this room but other colleagues are. The second principle, as Ben

and others alluded to, I think, on the first day, is that speculation on the markets

for investments is not the most reliable way forward. We need forms of

investments which support the real economy and which are under our control.

If we put our £5 million or whatever it is into the finance investment markets, we

do not control it.

So we organically, as it were, began to realise that maybe an investment future

for the GFTU would be to build the asset of the Quorn Grange site. Over a lot

of discussions we got to a position where we felt that if we built some houses

on the site we could generate some rental income, if we expanded the nursery

that we have got and build a purpose built nursery we could have a good social

purpose and educational purpose there, but also have a new income stream

doubling the current income from the nursery. We then looked at the hotel and,

despite all the successes of the hotel we have got, maintaining an above

industry average occupancy of the rooms of 65%, it ain’t big enough. We are

just below the threshold for not just getting more business and, therefore, more

profit into the hotel, but also not all of our unions can hold, for example, their

national conferences there. So if we were to expand the hotel by about 24

rooms, more unions could have more events there, but also economically we

would generate proportionally more profit for less investment, as it were. That

was the direction that we took. We did business models on those three

elements and I have lost count, but I think probably at least three times and we

scrutinised them to death and the figures always came back the same. When

Wendy arrived we asked her to examine it carefully and she came up with the

same figures as well. The figures are that there would be about an £85,000 a

year new income stream from the houses, there would be about a £200,000

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