Thirty-one members of fifteen groups assembled at National Forest YH for this year’s Affiliated Groups’ Conference. Jeff Murry took the chair, and welcomed the delegates to the day’s proceedings.
First up was a presentation by yours truly on How to Improve on Your Website. Subjects covered included ways of getting an online presence in the first place, what content to include, and some of the features made available by people like Google Code.
If you’re interested, you can read my presentation slides. There’ll also soon be a series of practical articles on this website showing how to incorporate features like Google Maps and RSS feeds.
After a break for tea & coffee and a welcome from the hostel manager, it was time for the main event of the morning: a talk by YHA Chairman Chris Darmon. With the YHA’s financial year having just finished, Chris was able to fill us in on how YHA is weathering the credit crunch.
As you might expect, it’s not good news – overnights down 1% and a “difficult year” for food and beverage sales. Overall the association ran a trading deficit of £0.5 million.
That’s not a situation that can be sustained, and hard decisions need to be taken to remedy it. Fortuantely, Chris said, the almost total replacement of the management team over the last year or so has given the Association its best leadership in years. On the agenda are a rethink on hostel catering – “home cooked, solid food, traditional food” – more shepherd’s pies and less posh nosh. With hostel staff already cut to the bone, staffing cuts will need to be made at national office – 15 redundancies are expected at Matlock. Over all the aim is to break even next year and be strong for 2011: “At the end of this recession, YHA needs to be here, needs to be vibrant and ready to respond to the new world.”
That’s not to say that YHA won’t be spending money over the next couple of years. There’s £11.5 million’s worth of work underway making hostels “fit for purpose”, with £37 million still planned for. Improvements will not just benefit hostellers, staff accommodation is to be improved too. Not a moment too soon, reckons Chris, “You wouldn’t put your dog in places that we ask some of our staff to live in!”
Inevitably, hostel closures are under consideration. One already earmarked to go is London Thameside (formerly Rotherhithe), which will close some time after 2012. Not that YHA’s looking to get out of the capital, far from it! The weak pound is making London such a hot destination that the seven London hostels provided 25% of YHA’s income last year. What they’re looking for is a big 400-bed hostel along the lines of Sydney Central. The property crash may give them the chance.
Chris then went on to talk about the ongoing governance review. Still smarting at the check administered at last month’s EGM, he said that the Board has no choice but to come back on governance proposals. Should the proposals be rejected a second time we would be in “a crisis of governance“, and Chris believes that the Charity Commission would intervene.
With that in mind, perhaps, he encouraged affiliated group members to go to their next regional council meeting and get elected to attend the AGM. Personally, I’m not sure that this is entirely constitutional, since Councils elect their delegations from amongst their members, and they were elected back in the autumn. Still, no doubt many councils would welcome an influx of new blood however late in the year it arrives.
It was good to see the YHA Chairman attending the Groups’ conference, and to see him so positive about our role within the organisation. Hopefully it signals a thaw in our sometimes frosty relationship with Matlock.
After an improvised lunch, we returned to elect five delegates to the national AGM. They were:
- Ann Mayhew – Bedford
- Chris Moyle – Stafford
- Alan Summers – Leicester
- Matthew Webber – Harrogate
- Paul Wright – Ipswich
Next was the presentation of the President’s Awards. As head of the judges, Paul Madge read out the results in each category as well as the overall winner. This year was dominated by two groups, with Croydon and Barnet dividing all the categories between them.
Paul noted that the structure of the awards had not changed since the abolition of the old NHLGC. Does it need to be updated? Are groups doing new things that need to have awards? Paul’s open to ideas, so contact him or comment below if you have a view.
The presentation was followed by the chance for each winning group to describe what they did, and to field questions from the rest of us. Hopefully, enough tips were picked up to ensure a wider spread of results next year!
Finally, it was time to discuss the two motions raised by Bedford Group. The first, it was agreed, was not really a motion in its original form and was amended to read:
We call on the Trustees to explore filling the gaps in the hostel network as soon as finances allow, where viable.
In this form it was passed 12-1, though just when finances might be so abundant as to consider a return to low-demand places like Ivinghoe is an open question.
The second motion, calling on hostels to have members’ kitchens was pushing at an open door with YHA’s new management. “My advice is to pass this motion and move on” was Chris Darmon’s suggestion, so the conference did just that. Unanimously.
An open forum at the end allowed a few loose ends to be tied up. What will YHA do to celebrate its 80th birthday next year? “Time we had a rally”, thinks the Chairman, probably a major event at Ilam Hall to which we’ll invite the Queen (who is patron of the Association).
With nothing else of note to discuss, it was time to fix a date for next year’s conference. The most likely date is 20th March, or possibly the 27th. However, it was made clear that we need to get more groups to attend. I hope this site can contribute to making next year’s event something that meets groups’ needs, and that they want to turn up to.
My thanks to Ivan Morley for providing some of the photographs used on this and the previous story