West Somerset Railway General Discussion

I would say the WSRA and WSSRT are fundraising for what is important to the railway at present, track renewal.

The PLC obviously have other things they want to spend the money on such as paying off there loans, unnecessary legal fees, the list goes on. I would personally encourage donations to the WSRA or WSSRT because you know its going to be spent for the good of the railway, not the good of a board or individuals.

 

Given the alleged retort (of where he should go!) to the former WSRA Chairman this presupposes that donations from the WSRA and WSSRT would be spent as they intended. The vaunted HPC Fund windfall was not spent as hoped, by some West Somerset people, it seems. (See past posts by Andy Norman.)

 

Are you saying that the money given to the railway is lining the pockets of the board or individuals? I hope you can prove it.

 

Poses the question given that most staff are on furlough at. Present surely they are protected from redundancy? Also Williton was a. Seperate entity until recently why the change

 

no - furlough doesn't protect anyone from redundancy. Nor does it suspend the need to consult on redundancies. Whether the WSR has any plans to do so, I have no idea.

 

That's a very strange reading of what was actually written.

 

It's officially called the Job Retention Scheme. It's to stop companies making employees redundant.

 

Recommended in the Coombes report that the WSRA should concentrate on fundraising and not run a restorations business and shop. Both now transferred?/sold? to the plc

Keith

 

It can't stop people being made redundant; it's there so firms don't have to make people redundant atm and as such that they hopefully reopen and not have to make people redundant. However firms have already made people redundant rather than claim it. To repeat it cannot stop people being made redundant and we are likely to see firms lay off people when the realise they will have to change size as a result of the impact of lost revenue. That is what the Chairman hints at.

 

Most of the WSR's ills lead back to that fact.

 

Yes it won't save everybody, but the idea is to protect jobs rather than people being laid off straight away.

 

And as we saw with the Rolls Royce announcement yesterday, the protection is provided by making sure firms don’t run out of cash to keep staff on, not preventing them from making redundancies if they judge it necessary.

However, I’d be cautious about reading too much into the phrasing of a vlog that uses phrases which can have specific meaning.


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I would assume it is no different to BA saying it may make 12000 redundant, Rolls Royce 9000, etc etc.
This explains the BA take on such things
https://simpleflying.com/british-airways-job-consultations/

 

Of course the very mention of redundancies could be the Chairman exerting pressure on people to give more, the implied threat being, if you don't dig deeper I will have to make staff redundant, but of course, if the PLC, though it's own stupid actions, were to go to the wall anyway, those same staff will still lose their jobs anyway, it , I would say is a distraction from what The Chairman wants to get on with, removing an non GW influence at the Railway.

 

I don't think this was your point, but just to correct one misapprehension on this thread the Fight Back Fund on the SVR is in favour of the PLC, not the Charity https://www.svr.co.uk/NewsItem.aspx?a=923

One still can donate to the SVR Charitable Trust and it still supports the wider SVR, but it can't do all of the things the SVR needs to do.

Whether or not this is relevant to the WSR discussion I don't know.

Patrick

 

The difference is that BA and RR have announced formal plans, and entered into the legally required consultation periods. I'm not clear that the vlog says anything as clearcut.

 

On Gift Aid, and charities: there was a comment up thread to the effect that the Gift Aid potentially increases the value of a donation by 25%. That is true, though there will be some donors who for whatever reason are not able to reclaim the GA, so the actual yield is slightly lower. I've just done a quick number crunch on another appeal collected through a charity, and the yield seems to be about 81% of what is theoretically possible - in other words, for every £1,000 of donation, while in theory that could reach £1,250 with Gift Aid, in practice it is reaching just over £1,202. Still worth having.

The other point that seems to come up frequently is whether a charity can "fund a company" or similar (and therefore by extension, whether in the current situation, emergency appeals are best structured via a charitable arm or the company arm in a situation where it is most likely the company that has the immediate cost pressures). As always, there are ways and means. The key things from the charity point of view are:

- The trustees must act within the remit of their charitable articles
- They cannot be compelled to act by an external body
- Funds raised for a specific objective must be spent on that objective (that is hugely important for donor trust, by the way).

So if money is being raised for track renewal, it must be spent on track renewal; similarly if money is raised to restore a locomotive, it must be spent on that. But there is nothing as far as I can see to prevent a charity awarding the company a grant, for example to restore a particular locomotive, and that grant going to support the wages of paid staff - provided those staff are directly engaged in the overhaul for whatever proportion of their time that the grant is supporting their salary. There is nothing explicit that says that such a grant can only be spent on materials.

(Thought experiment: if a charity chose to fund the replacement boiler cladding of a loco under overhaul, which will be a mixture of materials (steel) and labour (to shape them), why is it inherently OK for that to be outsourced to the Acme Steel Fabrication Co. of Bristol where some member of staff will have his wages paid by the grant; but not OK to have a member of railway company workshop staff similarly funded to do the same work? The cost will be similar either way - probably cheaper if done in house - as will the final outcome.)

That might be particularly the case for a charity that has an educational remit, since in the current crisis, I think you could argue that there is an existential threat to the continued existence of heritage operating and engineering skills, and therefore anything that supports the retention of those skills could arguably be seen as within the educational remit.

My feeling is that you need to start with the question "what do we wish to achieve?" and then see how the various component bodies can best organise to achieve that, rather than "what can each body do?" which very often rapidly turns to "what are all the things it can't do?" The critical thing is that the company can't demand that the charity provides support; but it can set out its objectives which the charity may then find a way to support by a direct cash grant. "Give us £50k" doesn't work, but "We'll support the retention of core engineering skills in the workshop by a grant of £5k per month for the next year so that the staff can work on overhaul of locomotive X" might well be acceptable.

Tom

 

Can anyone point me to the transcript? I cannot find it.

 

In my experience it's common for companies making smaller numbers of staff redundant to follow the procedures for 20+ people even when not strictly required. So I wouldn't read anything into that.