Report of March Council Meeting

[<<] [>>] by Dr Ian Vincent at Hurlingham
26th March 2013 (CqE Official News)

For the January Council meeting to have been affected by snow was not too surprising, but I had not anticipated that wintry weather would return to prevent several members from getting to the March one! However, 21 people made it, including Christopher Roberts, the new Editor of the Gazette, who was also standing in for Brian Fisk, who was getting married.

Email votes on motions to approve the budget, discontinue separate fraud insurance, authorise the management committee to make provisions for DBS checks and wind up the Lawns Advisory Group were confirmed. The 2012 accounts were approved and a discussion on the level of development grants concluded that they should be held at roughly the current level pending a wider review of the CA's finances.

I reported back from a workshop about the Disclosure and Barring Service, which is now the organisation responsible for providing information about the records of people working with children or vulnerable adults. An update service, to enable organisations to check that disclosures are still current, is to be introduced, to aid portability, but only for those obtained after the operative date. Advice for clubs and individuals concerned will be published.

Trials of two temporary variations of the laws were authorised for this season: one for the wrong ball law in Golf Croquet, the other for handicapping doubles pairs in Association Croquet.

The recommendations of a working party on the Regeneration of AC were accepted as suggestions which clubs might like to consider and feedback their own ideas for what worked for them. The main thrust was to get people playing a form of Association Croquet with simple rules on small lawns quickly, rather than risk putting them off by highly structured coaching in the early days.

The conclusion of a paper outlining the implications of the CA reconstituting itself as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, that the CA needed to decide whether it wanted to be seen as a charity acting for the public benefit or as a private members' club, was discussed. The general consensus, though with some reservations, was that charitable status was the right way to go in principle and hence that further work to investigate the details should be undertaken. A working party was established to do this, which would welcome input from anyone with specialist knowledge in this area. In the meantime, amendments to tidy up the current constitution, primarily to align it with the WCF's Statutes, were approved to be put to the 2013 AGM.

The other major discussion was on the report of the Federation Working Party, which made recommendations in four main areas: the constitutional position of federations; the relationship between federation and CA competitions; geographical boundaries and subscription structures. All these are areas where problems are perceived with the current arrangements, which have not kept pace with the growth of competitive play in many federations since they were established in Sports Council regions some thirty years ago. The recommendations are not proposals cast in stone, but rather ideas for discussion with clubs and federations at meetings over the coming winter.