GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

the money markets. The situation created kind of a structural difficulty for us.

We want our affiliates to have very low affiliation fees and we want them to get

in return more than they pay in, if you like, which means we have got to make a

lot of money on our investments and by doing other things, but we got into a

position where we were not doing that and there was a fatal flaw in the system

that we had. We were not making enough off the investments, if you like, to

keep the level of commitments that we had to affiliates, so over the last four or

five years we have been working hard to try and change that situation. We

have been looking at ways of investing and making our money work which

create meaningful work and which are more reliable and, of course, on

Tuesday we have got a big decision to take about that for the future.

What we have done within the organisation is to create a new structure. We

have asked the Educational Trust rather than to be a continual receiver of

funds from the GFTU to find ways itself of generating income for the

educational activities. Of course, the big way that we have done that is by

setting up a trading company which runs the hotel and nursery in Quorn and

the more we make there, the more that goes back into the Educational Trust,

the more we can provide to affiliates. That has meant that we have had to set

up much more robust financial management in the charity, obviously new

companies to run the affairs and they all have their own sets of accounts which,

you will be pleased to know, do not come to the BGCM, because they are all

approved by the relevant boards and committees that run those organisations.

All of those parts of the GFTU family have had their accounts approved by their

governing bodies and as delegates to the BGCM you have had copies of them

in your pack for information and obviously any questions about those would be

welcome and we will try to deal with them.

If you have had a look, you will see that the GFTU had a deficit of £120,000

last year and it had a surplus at the end of 2015 of £540,000, so that has gone

well. If you have had a look at the Educational Trust, that has gone well and if

you look at the hotel and nursery accounts, they are on target and they have

gone reasonably well too. There is another bit of our organisation which could

cast a really difficult shadow over the whole thing and that is the pension

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