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Why a Trustees' election this year?

In each of the years since 2012, the number of volunteers to serve as trustees has been less than or equal to the number of vacancies on the trustee board. This year we have some new aspiring volunteers, which is excellent news for the Association.

Our May Bulletin invited nominations and in explaining the process, left a number of questions. “IWA’s Articles of Association provide for a maximum of 17 trustees (or 18 in the event of a co-opted National Treasurer), but the method of appointment is left up to the trustees to decide. At the moment IWA’s trustees have chosen to keep four trustee places vacant as part of their plan to ultimately reduce the number of trustee places to ten.“

In simple terms, would it have been better to expand the trustee board to absorb all the new volunteers without having an election? As none of the trustees’ current appointments had been contested, why turn new volunteers away?

But Bulletin’s wording is poor. We currently have thirteen trustees, and there are zero “places vacant”. If we had decided to enlarge the board, that would have created vacancies: there was no proposal to do that, and good reasons not to do so. Looking at the question in-the-round needs an awareness of the history of the Association’s governing board and how we arrived at where we are.

In the beginning, in 1946, we started a members’ club to which all members paid an annual subscription, and over the years extra groups of activists set up new bits of the IWA across the country, for the most part collecting extra subscriptions from those who joined. There was a national Council elected by the members to run the Association. We became first a limited-liability Company and later, additionally, a Charity. Both changes brought more benefits from the public as a whole, and more responsibility to tell the public and the regulators what we are doing with the money and tax breaks which are granted to us.

By 2007, our governing Council members were both directors of IWA Ltd, the company, and trustees of IWA the charity. The Association’s earlier constitution has morphed into company Articles of Association. There was a provision that each of eleven Region Chairmen, appointed by the regional activists on their region committees, should be members of the Council, and this group should be outnumbered by one by the group of nationally-elected Council members. With eleven regions, this made a Council of at least twenty-three. John Fletcher, the National Chairman, was concerned that the Council was unwieldy, and spent its meetings worrying too much about the detail of IWA operations; in summary it was too big and cumbersome to do its job effectively. There was a national consultation on reforming the organisation at all levels.

After much debate and consideration of various structures with smaller committees, with Regions no longer directly members of Council, a compromise emerged that there should be only eight Regions, and hence a Council of seventeen: it was still a big group of people. Crucially the Region chairmen were now to be directly elected by members of their geographical regional. As it turned out, this election process was never tested: during its time, there was never more than one nomination for any Region Chairman. The result of this change was that there was a much weaker democratic argument for having more nationally elected Council members than activist-appointed Region Chairmen, since both were being elected directly by members. Changing the constitutional requirement for “one-more” would have required a three-quarters to one-quarter majority at an AGM and this was never proposed by the Council. A non-controversial tidy-up amendment changed the Council’s name to the “Board of Trustees”.

In 2014 I proposed to the trustees a range of alterations to improve democratic accountability and efficiency. For example, I advocated a direct member-election of the National Chairman; there was insufficient support from trustees for this, and so we have never proposed it to an AGM: it remains my belief that members should be able to directly say who is our most-publicly visible advocate. We were able to agree a limit on trustee board membership of twelve years (I preferred six) before standing down for at least three years. Before this change, the record continuous membership had been about twenty-three years.

In 2016 we completely rewrote our governing Articles, along the lines of a model constitution advocated by the Charities Commission. I stood up at the AGM to emphasise to members that they were giving to the trustees almost absolute control of the Association, including setting the membership fees and writing the procedures for appointing new trustees, all without needing further reference to the members at an AGM. This was agreed with very little opposition, and these are the current governing rules: they include the absolute limit of seventeen trustees, but it is now the trustee board’s decision on how many we have, and what is the balance between regionally elected trustees and nationally elected ones.

Using these new freedoms, the trustees agreed to split the role of Trustee and Region Chairman. Henceforth Region Chairman were to be appointed to that job on the recommendation of the Region committee, but were not automatically trustees: all the trustees were to be nationally-elected in the same way. There was no immediate change to the trustee board’s membership, as the eight Region Chairmen were to continue to the end of their elected terms-of-office, while holding both jobs. It thereby became possible to resign one of the jobs while continuing in the other, and one trustee took that option to concentrate on being Region Chairman. Additionally Region Chairman who were not also trustees are to be invited to trustee board meetings as observers: hence the trustee board meetings could expand to twenty-five people if the two roles diverged across the whole country. This seemed a poor idea, and my advice was not to split the roles before it had all been thought through properly.

Having implemented the split roles, and accepting the importance of inviting all the Region Chairman to attend, it was on my proposal that the number of nationally-elected trustees be reduced over a period of a few years, to keep the meeting size about the same as before. The trustees have agreed to this, and ideally it will take effect gently as the number of trustee doing both jobs declines. For the moment we have thirteen trustees, and I am one of three seeking re-election this year, together with others who have been nominated.