Cycling UK Forum

As promised I said I would report on the progress with any ballot errors.

Other than the printer error with family members described above the total number of other errors notified to us to date is 15.

All have received replacement forms.

Kevin Mayne

In respect of this problem the printer recieved a correct mail merge document and data from CTC.

When transcribing the mail merge to their printing software the printer repeated one column on the voting section of the form.

Hence this only applies to families above a certain size where a name is repeated which enables us to identify precisely who is affected.

There are also inevitably a small number of other errors in our data as there are every day as we turnover renewals, applications and mailings for over 70,000 people, those are being dealt with within CTC as they are identified.

Update

We have issued the following statement for Cycle Clips tomorrow

"All members should by now have received a voting paper for the Poll of the Whole Club, either in the latest edition of Cycle or by post. Any member who has not received a voting paper should contact the Returning Officer at National Office as below.

It has come to our attention that there is a specific error which affects some Family members and shows a duplicate name and possibly a missed name. After a review we are pleased to report that there is no problem with your membership records or the data used for the poll but we are disappointed to find that there is a fault in a number of forms which was caused by the printer who has apologised and agreed to pay the cost of replacing the forms affected at their cost.
All affected voting papers have been identified, and the printer has agreed to issue replacement voting papers in a way that means that they can easily be identified so that votes are not duplicated. Any member affected by this error should receive a new voting paper shortly. If you have already voted by deleting a duplicate name, your vote will be accepted as valid and counted. Alternatively, please vote using the replacement form.

The vote closes on 14 January and all returned papers will be verified and counted at National Office on Monday, 17 January. Until then, all the voting papers are being held securely and will not be opened until the day of the vote. Jeff Tollerman who requested the re-run of the vote has been invited to attend the counting to verify the result, and any other member who would like to attend will be welcome, subject to numbers and agreement to data protection rules concerning the privacy of individual ballot papers. If you would like to attend, please let Returning Officer, Peter Jackson (peter.jackson@ctc.org.uk) know."

I'll reserve commentary about how we feel about the printer...........

Kevin

Thanks Swansonj for your comments.

I apologise if the response seemed impersonal. When I post in this forum I hope you will accept that I am going to express myself somewhat formally, given the emotion attached to this issue I am going to be sticking to the procedural stuff. There is lots we can and will do to assess this situation but it must be evidence based.

I just do not have the mandate to make on line judgements about the issues you raise here regardless of any personal thoughts I have. We will operate the procedure that the board approved, we will report, we will offer our judgements on the issues to the board, we will if needed get legal advice and we can let you all know as clearly as possible what we are doing.

But believe me we care, you don't work for CTC without an undelying commitment to what we do.

Sorry I can't say more

Kevin

Please let me confirm.

We have procedures for this. Every request for a replacement form, every identified error is logged, both against the membership record and against a tally which will be kept. This will be published with the results as is custom and practice for all electoral processes and indeed for every contact between you as a member and CTC.

On Thursday the count stood at 14, including 1 lost form, we can be that precise. Officers will report these figures weekly to the relevant Council Committee and to our professional advisors and the Council will decide if there is a material problem which requires action.

Every quarter we report to the Council the status of all our complaints reports and we report annually to the AGM. These figures will appear there too.

These are never ignored. If you wish to complain formally about any aspect of CTC then you are free to contact me, but I can only treat complaints as official by a direct approach, forum comments are treated as discussion.

Thanks

Kevin

If this helps clarify some points in the thread.

The conduct of any CTC vote is set out in two ways.

Either it is fixed by rules set by company law or by our AGMs and written in to our various constitutional documents http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3649

Or the procedures are set by the Council, by resolution or by one of its committees appointed for the task.

In this case the person who receives the votes, who gets papers and how they are sent out is included in the procedures set at AGMs, including reference to family, household and those not receiving a magazine. Therefore we have to achieve these minimum standards.

The decisions on how to count, who counts, who observes and what to do about complaints will be determined by the Council or based on the legal advice we receive. My job as Company Secretary and Peter Jackson’s job as Returning Officer are to carry out the procedures based on the advice or the policies agreed, to keep the records and publish the results.

No specific guidance exists on some of the points raised by Clarion but Peter worked extensively with ERS and our legal advisors this year and in previous years to establish best practice in these matters. Many of our members and Council members also have extensive experience of both governance and government elections so we will be guided by those processes which are very well established. People like Greg (Regulator) have made helpful suggestions this year, other suggestions can be considered between now and the count but they will most helpfully be tabled as suggestions to Peter at the usual email address peter.jackson@ctc.org.uk so that he can discuss them with the relevant Council members.

Our current advice to members is that if you have any doubt about any of the information on your form or you do not appear to have a form please contact Peter for a replacement for the avoidance of doubt.

I hope this helps, and we appreciate members' eye for detail in these things, it really helps.

Kevin

I can respond to Karen's quetion because it is a matter or policy, not viewpoint.

Council repeated the survey of member groups this year. Top of groups requirements was a "dedicated point of contact at national office".

This was confirmed as a priority by the committee reviewing the survey and in October Julie Rand took on this role.

In addition managers were asked to look at the support for a number of other areas in the survey and in a recent circular several other staff were asked to take on additional responsibilities for supporting groups, increasing the available resource.

The member groups officer has been an employee of CTC Charitable Trust since the trust was founded, funded by the annual donation from the club to the trust.

These decisions are all minuted policies of the Council.

Sorry, Greg is wrong in his posting about the next Council meeting

CTC Council meetings are open to members but standing orders require those wishing to attend to register in advance and there is a limit of six observers, normally allocated on a first come, first served basis. This allocation has existed since long before I worked for CTC and I have no idea why the level was set at six but there has not been demand to this point.

If more than six people apply Council can consider temporarily lifting standing orders but it would be extremely useful to know numbers, not least for the very practical reason that we are using hired premises and we have to arrange facilities with the venue.

As the Secretary to Council is currently stuck abroad behind an ash cloud I suggest anyone wishing to attend emails cycling@ctc.org.uk where it will be passed on.

Sorry, Greg is wrong in his posting.

CTC Council meetings are open to members but standing orders require those wishing to attend to register in advance and there is a limit of six observers, normally allocated on a first come, first served basis. This allocation has existed since long before I worked for CTC and I have no idea why the level was set at six but there has not been demand to this point.

If more than six people apply Council can consider temporarily lifting standing orders but it would be extremely useful to know numbers, not least for the very practical reason that we are using hired premises and we have to arrange facilities with the venue.

As the Secretary to Council is currently stuck abroad behind an ash cloud I suggest anyone wishing to attend emails cycling@ctc.org.uk where it will be passed on.

As members will note I am not an active participant on this forum but I have to intervene on a matter such as this which relates to staff conduct.

For clarity on the policy position of staff.

It was clear that the subject of staff participation would come up in this discussion at some point. To clarify and protect the staff I took formal proposal to the Council's policy committee for communication which set out the sort of communication plan that could be envisaged, and its purpose. Others have posted it on this forum. Those who have seen it in earlier postings will know that it had little detail at that stage but it contained examples of the sort of things that could be done. Most importantly it explicitly said that if the plan was adopted staff would deliver a campaign in favour of the Council's position.

This gave the opportunity for Council to indicate whether staff should be involved in actively working for the Council's position or whether they should be providing the platform for debate and letting others fill it. A crude analogy might be an election where civil servants are neutral and a referendum where civil servants work to promote the position of the government of the day. This was an open debate, John Meudell was at the meeting, he spoke against and had the chance to make points like those in this forum to his peers.

This proposal was voted on by the Committee which chose to vote in favour of a communications plan which would be in support of the Council's recommendations.

Under CTC's standing orders it was subsequently reviewed by the full Council because some members questioned the decision of the committee. The Council voted on a proposal to overturn the Committee's decision supported by Greg and John. That proposal was defeated. In both cases staff did not comment during proceedings other than to explain why such a policy was needed.

Any subsequent communication is informed by that policy, I would not have any member of staff including myself work against any policy position of the Council.

Kevin Mayne

The supplementary paper on the loan has now been added to the Financial FAQ

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=5363

That's fair comment Gaz and I hold my hand up, I did tell you I would be publishing a response to your query and I am the bottleneck.

I have drafted a much more detailed revison of the background and practical implementation of the Club's loan to the Trust which includes the correction to the question of the interest rate being charged. I completed this about a week ago.

As the loan structure was set up on the advice of our professional advisors I sent the draft to them for comment as it would be inappropriate for me paraphrase their advice without checking.

I have not had a reply and I have now been told the Club's Honorary Consulting Solicitor was on holiday last week. If I can't get a formal response I will have to publish the redraft this week and add a note to that effect.

Apologies

To quote myself in the attached statement

"I think it is reasonable to have the discussion based on a common understanding of the underlying numbers."