Matt, I appreciate how you must feel from personal experience. I have been involved with BCA and CCC since 2014 where I have seen several friends arrive enthusiastic then leave having lost heart. I am sorry that I have added to your burdens.
I also understand that you need to give your professional work top priority and I also understand clearly the importance and relevance of your professional work. This does, however, leave a problem for BCA in that there is legal filing deadline fast approaching us, and with it comes the need to allocate a new budget. What to do?
Thanks for emailing me this morning with the ?Cookie? motion that concerns the JR. I can now see the jist of it is a ?50,000 cap on legal expenditure and any increase beyond that figure needing a national ballot.
At the moment the agreed BCA budget is an order of magnitude less than that cap as it only covers pre-trial work. We have a hard legal deadline of 21st April if the proposed defendant won?t agree to extend it somehow during the coming week.
I?d like to suggest that BCA Executive appoints an experienced and trusted pair of hands from National Council almost immediately to relieve you of that part of your secretarial work that concerns the JR. S/he as your deputy would get the agreement of National Council members, also literally in the next few days, and obviously by email in the circumstances, to raise the budget to match the worst-case scenario envisaged by our solicitors ? which is filing the case and then losing it. This would come in at under ?50,000.
If we lost this case, being an environmental one, the loser (us) would pay ?5,000 of the winner?s (government) costs where the loser is a person, or ?10,000 if the loser is corporate. In addition, both the loser and the winner must meet their own respective pre-trial and incidental costs. Alternatively, if we win, then the loser (government) would have to pay much more - our costs up to ?35,000 which is deemed the reasonable top end for JR cases.
The CROW case has in fact been brought by ?David Rose a member of the British Caving Association?. It is not clear if the claimant is therefore an individual or a body ? but it is certainly not the Cambrian Caving Council?s case as stated in the ?Cookie? motion, or me personally.
It?s a grey area whether an unincorporated members club, a non-legal entity like BCA or CCC are, can bring a legal action in their own name. Generally legal cases can only be brought by private individuals or incorporated bodies because they are formal legal entities. In the case of an unincorporated club like BCA, especially one lacking any Trustees, it is the individual members of BCA (you and me) who are jointly and severally liable for club actions because the club itself is not a legal entity.
I?ve looked at other national-scale bodies like The Ramblers, British Mountaineering Council, British Cycling, Welsh Rugby Union, Open Spaces Society, Mountain Bothies Association, to name but a few, and every one of them is a company. They are all the ?Cave Access Ltd? and "Charterhouse Caving Company Limited" type of company without shares and limited by guarantee. In nearly all cases they have obtained exemption from putting ?Limited/Ltd? after their name.
So in the wake of this JR case, questions will have to be asked as to whether the BCA as currently constructed is legally fit for purpose and agile enough to handle any future legal cases in more timely and focused ways.
It will also need to be asked during the process of sorting out a legal status, whether BCA should also be restructured in other ways too so as to ensure the interests of the majority of individual cavers receive priority. The BMC and MBA have gone through these processes in recent years, which were both protracted and contentious, so we should study that and perhaps ask to draw directly on their experiences in taking BCA along a similar road to give it a more secure and clearer future operating framework.
