Compulsory Membership?

[John McKenna]

That was your Capt. speaking and what he said was - I don't like it but circumstances dictate that we go full speed ahead, damn the icebergs (and torpedoes), and my officers are still working on a plan to secure both the children & the ship.

[Roger de Coverly]

I don't believe that this is a realistic option, and all I claimed was that realistically the earliest opportunity to make the change would be the next Finance Council. Now that we are well into the cycle of local AGMs, etc. and the details of the new membership and game fee scheme have been communicated, it would cause unacceptable confusion to start changing it again.

It wouldn't be confusing to defer the scheme, or at least some aspects of it. No change is always easy to implement.

You've got the problem which isn't going to go away, that the financial viability of the scheme depends on being able to extract directly or indirectly from junior organisations, much more money than was ever the case with Game Fee. At the same time as pleading poverty, the ECF is indirectly giving rebates to existing Direct Members.

[Andrew Farthing]

I would urge the ECF to seek to reverse this decision at the earliest opportunity.

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

I think it could be done, albeit it would be difficult to do so before the deadline for the nomination of the Olympiad teams.

My understanding is that the revised budget is to be submitted for the approval of Council by written resolution. You could instead ask Council to choose between:

a) approving the revised budget;
b) reversing the decision about Game Fee for junior events and approving (something close to) the original budget.

Everyone who knows my background and interests in chess will appreciate that I find the idea of not being able to send representative teams to the Olympiad extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, I would still vote for the first option.

The reason is that I consider the original estimates of the expected income from juniors to be highly over-optimistic. I await an answer to my question about the anticipated level of disaffiliations.

As for the lack of discussion at Council, there was a paper on the subject and I moved a procedural motion to enable that paper to be discussed before the budget was considered. The motion was defeated. C'est la vie.

Regarding the Olympiad, the practical difficulty is that the registration and payment deadline for the Olympiad is 1st June, so we are going to have to take a decision on whether a team can even be sent over the next week or so. There is no time for a resolution to be prepared, circulated and voted upon by Council.

The assumptions used in the original income calculations were set out in the spreadsheet included in the Council papers. I did not include a specific element for disaffiliations on the basis that there were offsetting conservative assumptions built into the model. As I have acknowledged more than once (and repeated at Council), it is not practicable to model the behaviours of players and organisations across the country with reliable accuracy, so any estimate is going to be an approximation.

My concern about the assertions made concerning likely reactions from junior chess organisers or competitors was that they were largely taken as read, when in fact their evidentiary basis was thin and, in my view, very questionable. They did not gel with the responses that I was getting from junior organisers in my local area.

The income projections which I referred to earlier in this thread (i.e. the ones reflecting the Council amendments) include a variable for 'drop-out', i.e. graded games or players disappearing from the system as far as the ECF is concerned.

[David Sedgwick]

That was your Capt. speaking and what he said was - I don't like it but circumstances dictate that we go full speed ahead, damn the icebergs (and torpedoes), and my officers are still working on a plan to secure both the children & the ship.

That's a very unfair remark.

Andrew Farthing has said that the changes made at Council will (on his calculations) sharply reduce income and that expenditure will have to be cut accordingly.

If he were proposing that we go ahead with the expenditure anyway, then your criticism would have some merit.

But he's not.

[Andrew Farthing]

At the same time as pleading poverty, the ECF is indirectly giving rebates to existing Direct Members.

As I have repeatedly said, one of the objectives of the design of the scheme was to address the previous inequity in the effective per-game pricing, taking into account membership subscriptions and game fee, between direct members and non-members. Direct Members typically paid more than twice the amount per game that non-members did. I don't apologise for trying to address this.

[Roger de Coverly]

The changes agreed at Council were made without a satisfactory understanding of the consequences

I thought it quite straightforward. The ECF wanted to increase the cost of participating in a typical junior event from around £ 1 per head per event to £ 12 per head per season. The Junior Organisations said that if you do that, you get nothing. So the Council meeting voted to cut the prices.

Whether one of the larger junior organisers will continue with its plans to withdraw the events it runs from national grading remains to be seen.

[Paul Cooksey]

We are discussing lots of things at once, as ever.

I don't know what the junior gamefee consequences of the decision will be, I don't have the facts. But I do think it is such a big change to the ECFs proposed scheme, that it ought to have been visible to delegates before the meeting.

[David Sedgwick]

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

I think it could be done, albeit it would be difficult to do so before the deadline for the nomination of the Olympiad teams.

My understanding is that the revised budget is to be submitted for the approval of Council by written resolution. You could instead ask Council to choose between:

a) approving the revised budget;
b) reversing the decision about Game Fee for junior events and approving (something close to) the original budget.

Everyone who knows my background and interests in chess will appreciate that I find the idea of not being able to send representative teams to the Olympiad extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, I would still vote for the first option.

The reason is that I consider the original estimates of the expected income from juniors to be highly over-optimistic. I await an answer to my question about the anticipated level of disaffiliations.

As for the lack of discussion at Council, there was a paper on the subject and I moved a procedural motion to enable that paper to be discussed before the budget was considered. The motion was defeated. C'est la vie.

Regarding the Olympiad, the practical difficulty is that the registration and payment deadline for the Olympiad is 1st June, so we are going to have to take a decision on whether a team can even be sent over the next week or so. There is no time for a resolution to be prepared, circulated and voted upon by Council.

The assumptions used in the original income calculations were set out in the spreadsheet included in the Council papers. I did not include a specific element for disaffiliations on the basis that there were offsetting conservative assumptions built into the model. As I have acknowledged more than once (and repeated at Council), it is not practicable to model the behaviours of players and organisations across the country with reliable accuracy, so any estimate is going to be an approximation.

My concern about the assertions made concerning likely reactions from junior chess organisers or competitors was that they were largely taken as read, when in fact their evidentiary basis was thin and, in my view, very questionable. They did not gel with the responses that I was getting from junior organisers in my local area.

The income projections which I referred to earlier in this thread (i.e. the ones reflecting the Council amendments) include a variable for 'drop-out', i.e. graded games or players disappearing from the system as far as the ECF is concerned.

Andrew, many thanks for the reply.

"My concern about the assertions made concerning likely reactions from junior chess organisers or competitors was that they were largely taken as read, when in fact their evidentiary basis was thin and, in my view, very questionable. They did not gel with the responses that I was getting from junior organisers in my local area."

I can only say that they gel completely with the reaction I was getting from my area. We shall probably never know, of course.

It's a very small example, but the SCCU (which does run events) will now be continuing with its junior competitions as now. Previously we were considering two choices for some of them: not having them graded or discontinuing them completely.

[Roger de Coverly]

Direct Members typically paid more than twice the amount per game that non-members did. I don't apologise for trying to address this.

#

I think you should. It's at the heart of the ECF's current budget crisis. If you play lots of chess, you really aren't especially bothered by each extra 60p per game.

What you should address and refuse to do so is the anomaly that you can be charged £ 27 to play a handful of games.

[John McKenna]

David, I thought my translation was a fair (but rough) approximation. I avoided adding that fuel (money) was running out and that speculation and rumours about objects being jettisoned (cuts) and old heirlooms (BCF PIF) being prepared for the boilers as I did not wish to put off potential passengers & crew.

[John McKenna]

What I'd like to add is that, in my opinion, Andrew is having to do the job of damage control & limitation to justifying a collective (disagree with his use of 'democratic' as Council seems more akin to a self-selected oligarchy) decision that he did not personally support, it seems. And for coming on the forum to do it I salute him.

[Andrew Farthing]

That was your Capt. speaking and what he said was - I don't like it but circumstances dictate that we go full speed ahead, damn the icebergs (and torpedoes), and my officers are still working on a plan to secure both the children & the ship.

That's a very unfair remark.

Andrew Farthing has said that the changes made at Council will (on his calculations) sharply reduce income and that expenditure will have to be cut accordingly.

If he were proposing that we go ahead with the expenditure anyway, then your criticism would have some merit.

But he's not.

Thanks, David.

From the outset of this lengthy funding saga, I have made the point that, if the majority view (as represented by the ECF Council) is that the ECF should exist on less money, I would implement this, provided that it specified where the cuts should be made, i.e. what activities it wanted the ECF to reduce or stop.

In April, Council took decisions which turned out to reduce the ECF's income significantly, which I accept (but don't like), andit indicated where savings would have to be made, namely the International Chess budget. I accept this too, although I hate the thought of England's not being represented by a strong team (or at all) at the Olympiad. The idea that we might not deliver such a fundamental part of the duties of a national federation really pains me, and since it is potentially happening on my watch, I feel a considerable sense of responsibility for it. That's not a comfortable feeling but it's one I have to live with.

[Roger de Coverly]

From the outset of this lengthy funding saga, I have made the point that, if the majority view (as represented by the ECF Council) is that the ECF should exist on less money, I would implement this, provided that it specified where the cuts should be made, i.e. what activities it wanted the ECF to reduce or stop.
.

The problem is that Council doesn't know what the ECF spends money on, other than at a superficial level. So if all the expenditure could be broken down and nominally assigned to a director's area of responsibility, it would or should have more insight. In the days when papers prepared for the Council meetings had to be circulated to all and sundry, I imagine very existence of Council itself was one of the cost drivers.

In some ways, the Olympiad issue and the budget is play acting. The Olympiad expenditure is now, the final income needed to pay for it isn't going to be raised until this time next year. You can set and approve budgets to your heart's content, but if the financial outrun depends on hundreds and thousands of individual decisions, you are just jumping into the dark. It's about eighteen months since the ECF board raised the membership issue. Would anyone have predicted the outcome of not sending an Olympiad team?

[Roger de Coverly]

In April, Council took decisions which turned out to reduce the ECF's income significantly

I think that should read "projected income" as objectively the ECF were looking to increase the take from Junior organisations to replace the significant loss of income that Council had voted the previous October with the extension of Game Fee exemptions.

[Paul Cooksey]

From the outset of this lengthy funding saga, I have made the point that, if the majority view (as represented by the ECF Council) is that the ECF should exist on less money, I would implement this, provided that it specified where the cuts should be made, i.e. what activities it wanted the ECF to reduce or stop.

I do not think Andrew is being intentionally tricky here. But it is hard to respond to the question without the expenditure information Roger refers to.

Maybe I should just tell my Council delegate I think the Management Services budget should be cut by the amount of any shortfall in future years. It seems unreasonable, because I've no idea what the consequences of reducing that budget would be. But I do believe the Management Services budget includes some things I value less than the Olympiad team, so I might get lucky and see them cut.

I'm reminded of Chris Majer's comment in the Finance Council that the ECF budget is always in deficit, and membership should be set at a higher level. It seems wiser now than I realised at the time.