Trusty time

AGM time at the National Trust again, with a rather dire looking meeting coming up at Swindon in October. Approve the minutes of last time, approve the re-appointment of the auditors. All that sort of thing.

The paperwork and a little poking around tells me that the National Trust has a turnover of around $1bn, compared with that of the National Grid at $20bn and that of world class companies which are of the order of $100bn and upwards. So without doing a proper check, maybe upper middle class, but not rich.

A chairman who was Labour flavoured at Oxford and who went on to a successful career in business; no doubt someone who knows all about running large organisations. A chief executive who started out as a graphic designer, then went into heritage, and did ten years or more at the Trust before making it to the top, where she is paid of the order of £200,000. The first insider so to do for a while, so that probably kept the troops onside. While it still irritates me that charities find it necessary to pay their senior people these sorts of salaries: in the olden days retired army types and retired civil servants would have done it for the glory - and the greater good. While collecting their index linked pensions from their day jobs, as it were. On the upside, what looks like a good pairing, bringing different skill sets to the party.

The only item of substance on the menu is a members' motion about the iniquities of barbed wire, not something I am going to get excited about. But presumably there is some longwinded, democratic process trickling up from the grass roots, and this is what floated to the top. Last year it was foxes and Stonehenge - the money which is being thrown at which last I moan about from time to time.

I would have offered three items, two of national interest and one of local. First, one might have discussed the merits or otherwise of the creeping Disneyfication of some of their sites, reflecting a mindset in which footfall and turnover are all that counts. Second, one might have discussed what to do about Clandon - the cost of rebuilding of which being something else which I moan about from time to time. Third, one might have left KPMG and gone for one of the tier two firms of accountants. The National Trust is not in the premier league, I don't suppose its accounts are terribly complicated and it would send a good message to move out of the cosy - and rather unsatisfactory - ring which is tier one.

We shall pass on this AGM.

PS: I ought to say that, along with hundred of thousands of other pensioners, we make extensive use of National Trust facilities. And not just as handy places in which to pull in at in the course of long journeys by car.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/stonehenge.html.