The final election address reached me within the last hour, so all the addresses will be in the public domain, as planned, in the morning. Most of the directors' reports are, however, still being worked on. On the agenda I have made a distinction between papers expected to be available by no later than Saturday (i.e three weeks ahead of the meeting) and others. I take Neville's point about drip-feeding, and am currently thinking in terms of a bulk upload of further documents towards the end of the week.May I ask will all the Director's reports and papers for the meeting also be available on the website at the same time as the election addresses? Since papers were put on the web instead of being posted two years ago, I have found it difficult to keep up as new papers keep being drip-fed onto the website. It is especially annoying when important financial papers only appear less than 24 hours before the meeting, meaning there is not enough time to fully digest their contents beforehand. This is further compounded if spare paper copies are not available at the meeting
There will be a number of documents not available then, and some of these do relate to finance. I would like to say something about this, given that finance is one of the areas with which I closely involved. While the ECF's financial year end was 30 April, it was indeed most unsatisfactory that final or indeed even near-final accounts regularly failed to be available for a meeting taking place the best part of 6 months after that year end. With the change of the year end to 31 August, it is now the Finance Council meeting in April rather than the AGM which will be asked to approve the statutory accounts. However, despite the fact that the AGM is now only just over six weeks after the year end, I am absolutely determined that there will be a robust set of accounts and commentary available for the meeting. This is not a trivial task, and while I will do my best I do not think, given the extent of my other ECF commitments, that these are likely in practice to see the light of day much more than a week before the meeting.
