Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

This has been pointed out previously by myself and others, but it would appear that the Board are not listening....

The M&AoA require AGMs at intervals of not more than 15 months. If the May meeting is declared invalid at some future date (eg after a Charity Commission intervention perhaps), then retrospectively the next one must 15 months after the 2022 AGM, hence by mid-August this year. Yet we are already at least a week past the deadline when the process should have been started to invite nominations for Trustees (as the current list is time-expired) and then issue the calling notices etc. So if no valid AGM takes place before mid-August then by virtue of Clause 3 the Trust will no longer be in compliance with its M&AoA and hence effectively unlawful.

What's the railway equivalent of 're-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic'?

 

Putting the injectors on, when the firebox crown has collapsed?

 

I feel that the chairman might be compared to the Captain of the that ship!

 

Captain Smith conducted himself honourably that night.
White Star Line's chairman, J. Bruce Ismay, on the other hand...

 

...and the part of the iceberg will be played by the station at Parracombe

 

In which case, what is the iceberg?


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Lorna Doone Farm

 

OSHI?

 

The legal advice.

 

The appalling actions of some of the trustees have been recounted at length on here. How can this information be publicised more widely, in particular to the rest of the membership?

 

It can be done, if someone has the appetite for a bit of hard work - and I am aware of where it has been successfully done, in a private organisation, post GDPR legislation.

The way around it is basically to force an EGM, and know that you've got the numbers to carry the vote. This will take about a year. How they did it IIRC was essentially:

• 'snowball' membership details to put together a shadow list of as many members as possible. This was basically by getting people to send their contact details willingly to an 'opposition' co-ordinator, then telling any other members they knew to do the same. Over time quite a substantial number of people were getting the 'opposition' mailings
• pressuring the 'sitting' board secretary with weight of numbers - both in terms of 'we represent x many members' and getting the members themselves to write to the board. Basically everything was gummed up with trying to fend off the rebels
• engaging solicitors to argue that the board has a duty to send out communications to the whole membership when they regard an EGM - so the secretary ended up doing the last of the mailouts, which ran to something like 5 postal communications with the entire membership over a three month period leading up to the EGM

but the point is that the EGM play, and the final sending of information and the 'case against' to the entire membership only happened once the opposition were confident that they'd managed to get their message out to enough people beforehand.

Forcing change can be done, but it's not for the faint hearted and it is time-consuming/all-consuming for about a year.

No, I'm not volunteering.

I think the problem has been we're talking about a 20 mile railway restoration project so the easy option, after a falling out, has always been for people to take their money/time/whatever and invest it in another organisation elsewhere on the route/within the family. What actually needs to happen is an opposition group *within* the Trust rather than going off elsewhere. The case study above was one where people had alternatives, but fixated singlemindedly on wresting control of the trainset, rather than moving to another trainset.

 

With difficulty, bearing in mind the limits imposed by effective communications, defamation laws, membership rules and such like. And, as examination of WSR threads will show, there will be many who will be reluctant to get involved with “politics” and predisposed to trust the incumbents.

The ability of such incumbents to argue that disputes over governance are interfering with restoration of the railway should not be underestimated, even where logic suggests that their failings are themselves undermining that restoration.

Those incumbents therefore have significant positional power. That may change - Peak Rail used to get a lot of coverage for governance issues which, it was argued, limited its ability to develop, but the departure of one key player seems to have enabled a significant change of style.

Regimes that are hollow within look strong until they implode. What matters here is that pressure is maintained to do the right things - and about process, not people - until change is forced.


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I know someone who has access to the email addresses of 762 Club members from a couple of years ago. It's around 170 names. Not current, and not the whole membership, but it's a start. For details please send me a private message.

 

I'm fairly certain that would be illegal.

 

Indeed, I'm not a lawyer, but I think any list has to be built, from scratch, with the explicit consent of everyone on it. Hence snowballing by personal referral. There are no short cuts here. It's best if people contact a co-ordinator to ask to be added to the list, one by one.

 

I doubt it as the addresses were all included in an email sent out and therefore published by the organiser of that fund.

 

Unfortunately, as two BBC presenters have recently demonstrated, responsibility for one’s own disgusting, inappropriate or immoral actions are merely shrugged off in our modern society with a counterclaim that no law was broken; I prefer the ending portrayed in the ‘Unpleasantness At The Bellona Club’.

 

As often the case….it depends.

 

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In which case the GDPR breach may already have happened.


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