For anyone interested in BCA Council goings on, here is a summary of the meeting last weekend and what was achieved
It was another packed agenda, but the meeting opened by us welcoming two new members to the vacant positions on BCA Council; Claire Ross as our new Conservation and Access Officer, and Jenny Potts as an individual member representative. Thank you to both for stepping forward to work to the benefit of cavers across the UK.
A review of all the reports emphasised the ongoing work, including efforts to better publicise the BCA, support initiatives, assess radon levels in caves, finalise a new BCA website (of which more news soon), amongst lots of other great work from our various Committees and Working Groups. We also heard how the backlog of cataloguing at the British Caving Library has started to be tackled thanks to the additional BCA funding granted at the October meeting.
Onto the proposals, and these saw some changes within the BCA?s IT Working Group that we hope will enable an expedited redevelopment of BCA?s back-end IT and membership systems to bring them more up to date. We know that the membership renewal process could be more slick and modern, and this is going to be addressed. There were a few housekeeping matters, including a decision to actually reduce the number of BCA meetings we have each year, as part of a desire to see more work done offline and electronically, encourage greater participation from our time-pressured volunteers, and of course save about ?1000/year in meeting expenses.
The meeting once again utilised remote access to improve participation from those not able to travel; all future Council meeting venues will be somewhere with good Wi-Fi to make this possible.
We voted to increase the value of the public liability insurance policy we give as a benefit to all our full members from ?5m to ?10m. This has been an ongoing discussion for a few years. However, a recently settled claim on a comparable BMC policy (~?9M) has now set clear precedent demanding we increase our cover. Pressure from other areas (e.g. some landowners) for a higher value policy has also increased recently, so this was an inevitability.
There were considerable updates to the Manual of Operations (a document that accompanies our constitution to outline processes) to bring it more up to date and reflective of the result of the November/December 2019 ballot. We also approved some new funding rules for Regional Councils intended to greatly simplify the way BCA funding is handed out. The new rules will enable better financial planning on our side, allow more activities to be fully funded via Regional Councils by removing several previously disallowed activities, and make lives easier all round for the volunteers involved. We cannot emphasis enough how keen we are to see Regional Councils take advantage of BCA funding to support projects.
BCA Council voted to support a youth caving initiative (Adventure Academy) put forward by our Youth and Development convenor. This is very much a start-up initiative, however it takes advantage of match-funding from the Stories in Stone project in the Yorkshire Dales, and if successful would be a tremendous asset to promoting caving with youngsters. The BCA are proud to be supporting such initiatives and the hard work of those trying to make them successful.
The BCA Council rejected a request for additional funding from the BCRA totalling around ?30000 over five years. While this may sound shocking, this was not through any lack of desire to support cave science, but was due to a feeling that more in-depth discussions were required to identify a more detailed and longer-term financial plan between the two organisations. Discussions are ongoing and hopefully we can return to this at a future meeting with a mutually agreeable solution to ensure our continued support of the BCRA and the excellent cave science work being conducted by their members.
Next BCA Council meeting;
Saturday 4th April 2020, Spanset, Middlewich.
Annual General Meeting 2020;
Sunday 14th June 2020, Priddy, Somerset (more information on the party weekend very soon!)
Matt Ewles
Secretary, British Caving Association
