North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Wow!

I will say that I hope the boards had nothing to do directly with the appointment of a mid (?) manager, but your point is not missed and they should be / are setting the tone. If the board only appoints from outside the industry , the managers will probably pick up that vibe as well.

 

All of which is fair comment and reflected in how the election process works in practice. The start point has to be the duty of any board to review its current membership against a matrix of the skills, experience, and in some cases qualifications, that it needs to function effectively. If there are gaps the options are either identify potential candidates that can fill them or pay for external advice or services. Just like many boards often appoint committees to take on particular tasks the NYMR Trust Board uses a Nominations Committee, including independent external resource, to interview candidates against the skills matrix agreed by the Board. That matrix includes experience of the ethos and practice of volunteering on the NYMR because that is such a critical requirement. At present there is a substantial majority of working volunteers on the Board . This year there will be eight candidates for six vacancies. Most are active volunteers. Voting members will receive details of their cv's and reasons for standing with comments on behalf of the Board highlighting the previous volunteering contribution of those that can be "the voice of volunteers at Board level". As suggested in a previous post the advantage of previous active particiption on the railway with the deeper understanding of the issues involved that creates, is not confined to volunteers. There may be employees with similar potential to make an effective contribution as trustees. The arguments for a voice at board level can apply to them as well. Many of the 10,000 or so members with the right to vote by post or electronically have no first hand knowledge of the candidates or their suitability. That's inevitable given that there are around 750 active volunteers. Whatever the background of those standing for election whether they're volunteers, employees or external, the election system needs to provide all those voting members with material to help them make an informed choice. A Nominations Committee helps do that. If the test is whether a majority of Trust Board members and candidates are active volunteers it appears to be delivering.

 

A simple question- how many people applied to stand but were rejected by the nomination committee?

 

You presume that an adverse outcome is evidence of incompetence. I’ve worked around commercial models enough to know that they are sometimes right, and at other times very wrong, and that the same level of input, scrutiny and assumption making are involved.

The model failed. We can see that, and the repeated assertions from @Lineisclear that there was a boost of £400k tells me that part of the point may have been to obtain a short term cashflow boost. Like all mortgages, it came at a cost.

The modern business consensus is that, when something goes wrong, you learn why and fix it x not go for scapegoats. I suspect @Lineisclear would argue that’s what happened; I’d suggest that the evidence of the 2025 fares model is that the plc are in some panic.

One further point. the fact that certain employees are on particular pay is being mentioned. I’ve no idea about heritage railway comparisons. But £90k for a highly qualified and responsible role doesn’t seem that high to me, and there can be grave costs for doing a job on the cheap. I also note that the role was done, not so long ago, by a volunteer - I believe quite successfully.

 

You need to answer the question from @ghost. All of this verbiage also ignores the key point that the trust board is the elected board of a membership organisation. If those members are disconnected by the idea that the board, or its sub-committee, may exclude “inconvenient” candidates, trust will be broken. The obsession with veto power is a fundamental failing, and out of line with published good practice.

 

Re the 12 month annual pass, I don’t believe anyone at the time believed a return rate towards the end of upwards of 40%, which would potentially minimise (to almost zero) the positive impact (benefit) of gift aid, as some of those returnees would have otherwise bought a ticket. But even if excel spreadsheets had modelled this scenario I still believe that few would have expected this outcome (of a 40% return rate, I certainly wouldn’t have), even if the NYMR is completely different as a concept of Beamish (not least that Beamish captures all secondary spend, unlike the NYMR where it is the fish friers of Whitby who benefit). I do think that management should be applauded for changing tack this year, even in the face of criticism particularly from those pass holders (and a proportion of that 40%) saying that are not travelling again, to the 10% model.

In the booking office where I volunteer I would guess we are encouraging some 40% of full line passengers to pay the 10% donation fare and gift aid, as opposed to some 70% of the previous model, but in my mind if the previous gift aid income was some £400k but almost wiped out by the potential loss of income from some of the 40% who would have otherwise bought a new ticket then the potential gift aid from the new model would probably be approaching £200k (40% new gift aid rate / 70% old gift aid rate x 400k), and which I would definitely argue is NEW income.

 

You aren’t counting those who never purchase, because they consider the fares are too high. Your calculation is invalid without then discounting for that (difficult to quantify) group.

 

After the first year of operation of the "annual pass" Gift Aid model the board wrote in the annual report that the model was "fully vindicated" - which does now rather seem to be a bit hubristic at least! Year 1 always had the potential to be the most successful, in that everyone would be buying their passes for the first time, and comparatively few people returning. (Even if you broadly intend to visit a given attraction only once per year, by careful selection of dates you can essentially use the annual pass to get half price admission. For example, if you make your annual visit in, say, the second week of August, then the following year you visit in the first week, that second visit is free. In year 3 you go back to the original date and so on. If you play that game - and many will - essentially you can visit once per year, but only buy a ticket once every two years.

You have often mentioned the £400k gift aid reclaim. Was that from year 1 of the scheme? How much was generated in subsequent years?

Tom

 

I already have, as the fare is the same as last year.

Last year if there was a figure 40% returnees then that means 60% only travelled once and must by definition have thought the fare was reasonable, as otherwise they would not have travelled in the first place. But then there would be others who only bought there pass because of the attraction of the annual pass, as an ex professional transport planner (where such calculations were my bread and butter) then I calculate a sweet spot of 80% (50% of the 40% returnees would have travelled in any case, but 50% of the 40% would think the fare too expensive), so a potential loss of income of some 20% from those this year now considering the fare too high but equally matched by the 20% who actually pay for a return visit.

 

I'll answer this post by making a couple of points. Firstly, if your deduction is correct, a gamble was taken with the gift aid offer in a bid to generate cash flow. Cash flow is really only valuable if it improves the cash position, but not if it is burning assets to do so. Should a charity be behaving in this way? I don't think it should, and I also see that the possible outcome should have been foreseen and communicated to other directors, who might then have baulked at supporting the move. Is it really good practice for a charity to gamble like that?

Secondly, I quoted payments made to the FD from what the annual accounts seem to say - but what they don't say is that this sum is for a part-time role - I don't believe he is more than 50% working on the NYMR's behalf, which, if true, would possibly make him the best paid employee of probably any heritage railway. Is he really worth it, based on the evidence of recent years?

 

To both questions, the honest answer is that we don’t know. Where the FD is concerned, I’d certainly be tempted to ask about value for money given the financial position of the railway - I am certainly not making the “reassuringly expensive” argument.

On Gift Aid, we would need to know what information was provided to Trustees, and the basis of their risk judgment. I could make an argument for going for a short term boost, but it would be very carefully qualified and I’d need to know a lot more of what was understood at the time it was made before doing so.

But we’re in danger of being hanging judges on what was a commercial decision, and getting into scapegoating. The real concern at NYMR is the persistent attempt to maintain a closed and tightly controlled governance, and the fact that this has delivered very large losses while doing a poor job of delivering the charitable objectives. This is a deeply flawed basis for delivering a financial turnaround on the railway, especially where there is limited sense of strategic thinking about really developing the commercial base of the railway.

 

You cite what is happening this year but you carefully ignore the fiasco that happened last year when several Trust board hopefuls looking for change failed to get through the Nominations Committee leading to the fact that there were places on the board that weren't filled due to a lack of approved candidates. There was significant uproar from the membership over this that, at least for this year, a degree of common sense has prevailed. That, at least, is a step in the right direction. An interesting aspect of a subsequent volunteers meeting to me was that, when the subject was raised quite vociferously, the Trust chairman immediately passed the response to you to give chapter and verse why things couldn't change due to legal constraints. I have also tried to broach the subject of change with two Trust board members to be met by responses along the lines of 'Don't go there' and 'I'm not allowed to discuss it.' I suspect that this is more of the 'Board directors must follow the party line' outside the boardroom that you advocate.

 

It's worth poiting out that the FD also performs that role on another heritage railway where Gift Aid has been very successful over a number of years. Whilst the example set by Beamish was helpful it was far from the only one used to form a judgement.
The NYMR is far from alone in incurring large operating losses. The reasons for that are many and varied. Implying that they are caused by its governance structure may suit the narrative of those that dislike it but the link is unsubstantiated.
We could go round and round in circles on the subject of Nominations Committees ( it's interesting that the Swanage Railway has just announced a programme of trustee recruitment on that basis) but the fact remains that the members voted overwhelmingly to adopt the current election system. It could be changed or modified if that's what the members want but the absence of the necessary AGM resolutions to achieve that tends to suggest that most are either content or don't care.

 

There's no arguing with this paragraph but however charitably one looks at it, it's a continuing saga of seeming indecision and uncertainty, coupled with a clear lack of understanding and vision of what a heritage railway should be about. Changing the business model - if that indeed is what's needed - should be about making the NYMR more attractive as a heritage railway, not changing its entire ethos to a park & ride, passing through an SSI, mentality. I'm writing this on the weekend of the annual steam gala, and who is going to argue that actually a steam heritage railway is not an attractive proposition in the face of that? That is, despite the self-inflicted damage of losing the runround loop at Goathland and thereby losing the ability to run shuttle services at the Northern, arguably the most attractive (for steam enthusiasts) end of the line. What is needed is to find a way of spacing that attractiveness over the whole season and advertising it - that's the way to fill the non-Whitby services. Above all else, what is really needed is a clear, and manifestly achievable, vision of how the railway is to evolve into a more attractive destination - and that has to be shared and explained to anyone who wants to hear it. That's really something that hasn't happened for a long, long time - "Bridges & Wheels" was perhaps the last, but even that was just a partial snapshot of objectives for the then-current round of funding applications. In the end, though, a lot comes back to the present management - can they come up with a workable plan to improve the business and make it profitable in a way that is acceptable to supporters and volunteers? If they can't they should be honest with themselves and those supporters and volunteers and move aside to let replacements have a go.

 

In response to the questioner at the AGM I was at pains to explain how the Articles could be changed by a members' resolution to abolish the Nominations Commitee or amend the way in which it operates. No such resolutions have been proposed.
It's not just me advocating that Board directors must support majority board decisions outside the boardroom. Acceptance of collective responsibility for those decisions is fundamental to being a director or trustee. Check any guide on corporate governance and the duty of directors and you will find that view confirmed.

 

The current gift aid model does indeed give a positive uplift on fare income and is a sensible approach, even if it goes nowhere near the claimed £400K uplift in a previous year. I do have concern regarding some of the unsubstantiated figures that are trotted out on here and elsewhere because, when you try to put them together, they don't really add up. Simplistically, £400K equates to 32,000 adult passengers (£400K/£12.50) and using a claimed take up of 70% that brings us to a total of just over a 45,700 passenger total. Now, admittedly, that ignores children and other discounted fares but that is a very long way short of the pre-covid " up to 300,000 passengers" claimed in the 2024 report and accounts. Even if you consider the passenger total to actually be passenger journeys that still equates to a substantial downturn. At a volunteers meeting earlier this year the CEO declined to answer a request for passenger numbers, dismissing them as "irrelevant." I wonder why?

 

You highlight the Autumn Steam Gala which does seem to be enthusiastically received. I very much enjoyed being part of making it succeed on Thursday. Whilst you're right to higlight the level of interest I wonder how much of that translates into financial support? My impression is that many people on station platforms are just there to watch. You ask how a workable plan to improve the business and make it profitable might be developed, so here's an idea. Re-instate a classic bit of railway heritage.....the platform ticket. The recently enacted Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act (generally known as Martyn's Law) applies to heritage railway stations and appears to take for granted that access and egress can be physically controlled. Perhaps theat requirement might be turned to advatage by installing systems so that everyone wanting to watch or photograph trains on stations has to buy a platform ticket?

 

Board directors do have to observe collective responsibility. That has nothing to do with nominations and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

The point is not that a nomination committee is, per se, a bad idea. It is that it can be, and has been seen to be, allowed to exercise veto power over candidates ability to put themselves forward to the wider membership.

As I recall the articles, the precise terms of reference are set by the board, at the discretion of the board. Why not commit that, provided a candidate is legally eligible to be a trustee, the committee will not exercise a power of veto and will only be used to recommend candidates based on the identified skills needs of the board?