At this year’s BMC Annual General Meeting, we’re asking members to vote on some significant changes to the BMC’s constitution. There are two constitutions to vote for: Proposal A (as recommended by National Council) and Proposal B, proposed by a group of members.
An incredibly detailed comparison of the proposed changes to the BMC Articles of Association has been written by BMC honorary solicitor Martin Wragg. Below is the first few paragraphs of the comparison article, the full document can be viewed here .
Martin Wragg: a comparison of the current Memorandum and Articles of Association with the Tier 1 Articles proposed by some members and the National Council recommended Articles
The BMC is the national representative body for climbers in England and Wales and the national governing body for competition climbing. In 1993 it converted from an association to a limited company when the current M&A were adopted. Although there have been some amendments on specific points since then, the Articles remain substantially similar. In the interval there has been a fundamental reform of company law resulting in the Companies Act 2006 (“the Act”) and the introduction of improved standards of governance not reflected in the current M&A.
Although they served the BMC well for 2 decades, the current Articles have given rise to difficulty in recent years due to confusion over the respective roles of National Council and the Executive Committee. Central to this is the deliberate ambiguity in Article 15.1 (“the Ambiguity”) which provides “The policies of the BMC shall be decided by National Council …. And shall oversee the work of the Executive Committee and the CEO ”. Company law provides that the board of directors is responsible for management and strategy, answerable only to the members in general meeting. Article 13.1 provides that members of Executive Committee are the directors and by extension Executive Committee is the Board.
Matters came to a head during 2016 and in February 2017 National Council determined to set up an Organisational Review Group (ORG) which was appointed in April with Ray Wigglesworth as independent chair. In the interval a Motion of No Confidence (“MoNC”) was submitted and as soon as that was published Sport England suspended grant funding which supports a range of BMC activities. These events coincided with an increased focus by government on governance of organisations that received public funding and the introduction of a new Code of Conduct (“the Code”) in October 2016. Although the MoNC was defeated at the 2017 AGM the suspension remained and this has added urgency to the review.
Your AGM: Thanks for your vote!
This year's historic AGM had a record voting turnout, with 6,796 of those votes being made online. We want to thank everyone for having their say and helping to shape the future of the BMC.
Detailed info on the BMC AGM 2018
Find out more about the last AGM. It's a complicated topic, so start with this one:
We were asking our members to vote on some significant changes to the BMC's constitution. Part of the discussion was the relationship between the BMC and Sport England.
There were two constitutions to vote for: Proposal A (as recommended by National Council) and Proposal B, proposed by a group of members. To learn more about the two proposals, you can read a detailed comparison written by BMC honorary solictor Martin Wragg.
How did the recommendations get decided? Read more about the process that lead to this stage, including the reports from the Organisational Review and more.
Watch the Open Forum debate
We held a debate in Manchester on 15 May for both options to be discussed. You can watch the livestream here:
VIDEO
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