Treasurer

Founded 1980

Chair:

Secretary:

Treasurer:

Graham Smith

Jan Thompson

Graham Mumby-Croft

Graham Mumby-Croft

Treasurer

Issue No. 79 Autumn 2018

RETIRED PRISON GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION: 2018 AGM TREASURER'S REPORT

I am pleased to be able to announce that for the ﬁrst time in at least three years I am able to report that at the end of the ﬁnancial year the Association's ﬁnances were in surplus rather than debit.

There are several reasons for this and in particular you will notice that there was no cost in the 2017 ﬁnancial year for diaries. This is because the invoice from the PGA arrived too late to be included in the

2017 ﬁgures and will appear in the 2018 ﬁnancial year ﬁgures. This may of course also mean that if the

invoice for the diaries this year arrives earlier we may very well ﬁnd ourselves bearing the cost of two sets of diaries in a single year. This will not be the ﬁrst time this has happened, and although it does tend to skew the annual ﬁgures slightly, it has no real detrimental eﬀect on the overall ﬁnances.

However, the headline ﬁgure is that at the end of the ﬁnancial year the Association had a cash balance of

£9897.61 in the bank, which, all things considered, is a healthy balance and one that in my view means the Association still remains ﬁnancially viable and looks set to be so for the foreseeable future. With this in mind, I see no reason to recommend either to the Committee or to this meeting, that any increase in subscription fees is required in the coming year. This is a situation that I will keep under review and, should the need arise, I will bring forward proposals to the Committee, and subsequently to the AGM, for an appropriate increase, in order to keep the Association ﬁnancially viable.

As you will be aware from my article “From the Treasurer” in the Newsletter, I took steps at the end of this ﬁnancial year to close the Lloyds Clubs and Societies account that had been in operation for several years, but had been superseded by the Barclays account, into which the vast majority of members were paying their subscriptions. One of the anomalies of this account was the fact that we were receiving several ghost payments from members who I was sure were no longer with us, but for whatever reason, their subscriptions were still being paid by Standing Order into this account, mostly at a rate of £5/year. Various attempts to contact these members or their families had failed, and it was my view that the only way to bring this matter to an end was to close the account. As a result, on the 31st of December 2017, this account was closed and the whole balance was transferred into the Barclays current account therefore in this year's accounts the Lloyd's Current Account will no longer exist.

You will note that the Benevolent Fund remains the same as last year at £5578.36p. There is an addition of £50.00 to add to that from a member who had overpaid subscription fees and who wished the overpayment to be paid into the Benevolent Fund. This should have been done last year but was overlooked by me and will be corrected this year. Apart from that, there has been no other movement in the Benevolent Fund.

Looking at income, the total for the year was £6195.00 which is an increase of £661.00 over the previous year, however you will note that this ﬁgure includes a sum of £300 of donations which is the amount donated by Committee members towards a retirement gift for Bob Duncan, therefore the increase in income was, in fact, a modest £319.00. However, this was oﬀset by reduced outgoings where the ﬁgure for

2017 was a total of £5565.31p against a ﬁgure in 2016 of £6232.21p, a diﬀerence of £666.90p. In this case, the expenditure for 2017 also includes the cost of the gift for Bob Duncan of which £300 was money donated directly by the Committee. Consequently, this gives a more healthy ﬁgure of a reduction in expenditure of £966, but it needs to be remembered that had we have had a diary invoice to pay in this period this diﬀerence would have been reduced to zero.

I should point out that the reason the costs for the teak bench which we bought for Bob Duncan as a retirement gift appears in the accounts is twofold: ﬁrstly, because I paid for the bench using the RPGA current account, so all donations from the Committee were shown as income to oﬀset the outgoing and secondly the balance of the cost was taken as a donation by members . The total cost of the gift to Bob was £364.99 of which £300 came from the committee and £64.99 from RPGA funds. You will note from the accounts that the 3 largest costs that we have as an Association are:-

Post/Phone Printing Travel/Subs.

The ﬁrst 2 items are inextricably linked as they relate to the cost of communicating with the membership and in particular of producing and distributing the Newsletter. Two editions of the Newsletter costs between £600 and £650 each to print, dependant on how many pages there are per edition. It then costs almost as much to post this out to members, meaning that in total each edition of the Newsletter costs approximately £1200 to print and distribute. At £2400/year this is by far the largest cost element of running the Association. As a Committee we are always seeking to ensure that we are getting the best value for money and the cost of the Newsletter is something we watch very keenly: however, we are united in our view that the Newsletter forms the backbone of the Association, and indeed was the founding principle of the RPGA, and as a result we always look to ensure that we do not scrimp on costs in this area.

Committee meetings represent almost entirely the cost of travel and subsistence. As a Committee, we are very aware of the need to keep the cost of meetings to a minimum, balanced against the fact that Committee members live in almost every corner of the country. We only meet 3 times per year, including this AGM, and always look to use a centrally-located prison establishment as the venue, making the best use of the generosity of friendly Governors who give us the use of a space for free. Additionally, several Committee members car share to attend the meetings which also helps to keep costs down.

As a result of our closer links with the CSPA, we have now withdrawn from membership of the PSPC saving our annual membership fee of £90 plus the travel and subsistence costs of attending 2 meetings per year in London. Alan Hall, who represented the RPGA at these meetings, is stepping down from the Committee with eﬀect from today’s AGM and we will not look to ﬁll his position at present.

I would like to turn my attention to the AGM. You will no doubt notice looking around you that the attendance is quite poor. Today has cost the Association in excess of £1000 and it does not take a genius to work out that with an attendance this low this does not work as good value for the Association. The Committee, and in particular Jenny Adams Young, put a great deal of work into researching this venue and we chose it on the basis of being central to the country with easy public transport access, particularly being so close to a railway station and major road networks. The idea was to make attendance attractive as an opportunity to meet fellow members and to transact the business of the association as our constitution requires us to hold an AGM. This does not appear to have worked. As Treasurer I do not believe the Association can bear such a cost on a regular basis and therefore we will have to go back to the drawing board with regard to the future format and venues for the AGM.

GRAHAM MUMBY-CROFT