GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

to rent to create an income stream, 25 new rooms at the hotel, bigger meeting

room and, importantly, new classrooms for the GFTU’s education programme

and new rooms at the hotel so that members and the public get more of an

opportunity to have the great time that they can have there, so investing in

creating jobs, in creating bricks and mortar on the understanding that that

would take up most of our capital assets. Our plan was to leave by the end of

the building programme this year about £1 million in the GFTU’s kitty and we

will nearly be there. We will be short of that. Through no fault of our own we

will not have as much left as we wanted. The builders, and you have never

heard this before, have you, did underestimate on some of the costs and we

have had to top that up? We unexpectedly found two mounds of dangerous

asbestos on the Quorn site which has cost us extra money and there were

extra costs on access to the site and various other things during the building

programme.

Despite our best internal good management we were then confronted with two

other problems. People know that the markets dipped at the beginning of this

year. You may not know that at the end of last year we were subject to a bank

mandate fraud and if you look up that phrase you will find that practically

everyone – local authorities, health services, private companies and so on –

are increasingly subject to bank mandate frauds. So someone snaffled

£400,000 out of our account. We have managed to get £300,000 of that back

and we are in dispute with the bank to try and get the last bit back and if we do

not get it from them we will make a complaint to the ombudsman. So we have

been well managed internally, but we have had a few slings and arrows and

outrageous fortune which have set us back a bit and not through our doing. So

that has been unfortunate, but, nevertheless, we are looking forward to a future

of investment in the real economy on the Quorn Grange site and we have also

commissioned a colleague in the education sector to study ways in which our

future education programme can not only get bigger, but can be self-sustaining

so that it does not rely on a complete 100% subsidy from the GFTU.

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