Well, it's time to sign off from Warwick blogs… as my user-name is going to expire tomorrow.
I think the blogging experiment has been interesting, and has generally been shown to promote freedom of expression, which must be a good thing.
I wish it well.
17 Aug 2005 09:08
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Dear all,
There will be a public meeting entitled
The staffing implications of business coming to today's meeting of Union Council
on Thursday (tomorrow) at 6pm in H0.58.
All are welcome to attend.
Union Council itself is at 7pm in S0.21.
The purpose of this meeting is basically to discuss whether any of the motions coming to Union Council have a beneficial or adverse affect on the staffing side of the organisation, and whether as a result it is desirable to vote for or against these motions.
Students are currently prohibited from discussing the staffing implications of motions at Union Council due to the Union's Staff Student Protocol. It is hoped that this meeting will help Councillors to better understand the consequences of the decisions they make, and that this will lead to better decision making.
This meeting is being held in accordance with the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 which guarantees the right to free speech within the law on University Campuses.
Benny
15 Jun 2005 21:49
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Follow-up to Public Debate from Benny Blog
Dear all,
If you haven’t read the blog entry that I am writing about I suggest you go back and read it (and the associated comments) first, otherwise you will not understand what I am talking about.
Gareth Barker stated on my blog that,
“If you want a rough figure for the commercial contribution (and it is rough) then you are looking at something closer to £3 million, not 300k mate. Infact, 300k is what is reserved for our capital expenditure to make building improvements and purchase new equipment for departments each year. As you should already know."
If it were true that the commercial operations were making a net surplus of something close to £3 million which was then contributed to the non-commercial side, this would mean that the net surplus was something around 70% of sales. I cannot immediately think of any company that makes a profit of anything like 70% of its turnover on a regular basis. It might be thought at a first glance that a contribution of 300k, representing about 7% of sales, might be the more plausible of the two numbers. However as I have a copy of the budget pack available, I can look at the figures to work out which one is more likely to be correct.
The purpose of this entry is to examine in some detail whether it is plausible that the commercial contribution to non-commercial activities is something close to £3 million. I am going to do this by using data from the Union’s Budget Pack, dated 23rd June 2004.
Please note that this is only an attempt to quantify the monetary gains from the Commercial activities. Non-monetary gains are not included, as these are not the purpose of this discussion, although it is obvious that there are substantial non-monetary gains for students from the Union’s commercial operations.
I am using data for the Forecast for the year 2003–04, as estimated at the time of the June 2004 budget. Although the Union will now know actual figures for this year the detail of these have not yet been released to students, and so this is why forecasts are used. I am also using these figures for consistency as the figure of £334,000 that is estimated in the budget is a forecast for the 2003–04 year.
The budgets show Operating Income as being £4,227,737 and Operating Costs as being £1,409,271. The difference between the two is about £2.8 million, this could be said to be something close to £3 million.
But where does this £3 million go? Does it all go towards funding non-commercial activities? The answer is clearly “no”. This is clearly the case, as these operating costs do not include the payroll of £2,294,999. Some of this £2.3 million is spent employing staff who work only on commercial activities, some of it is spent on staff who work only on non-commercial activities, and the rest is spent on staff who work on both commercial and non-commercial activities. It is not all spent on the non-commercial side.
Fortunately, help is at hand, as Section 6 of the budget pack divides the budget up into these three sections.
Commercial is defined of consisting of
a) Entertainments
b) Food and Beverage
c) Stewarding
d) Retail
e) Machines
f) Rents
g) Marketing
h) Market Research
i) Venue Operations
j) Reception
The only suspect entry on this list is Reception, indeed the Budget Pack states,
The Union Reception provides a huge service to the Union in a whole host of areas, and is our front line for numerous enquires and services. It sits perhaps rather incongruously under Commercial Services because it produces some income from room hire.
Arguably, Reception should be transferred to the list of departments that is both commercial and non-commercial in nature. However as the cost of reception is only £42k, this makes very little difference in the end.
Non-Commercial (or Membership) is defined of consisting of
a) Advice and Democratic Services
b) Sabbatical Officers
c) Student Activities
d) Societies and Sports Federation
e) Committees and Representation
Things which are both Commercial and Non-Commercial (or the so-called “Department Services”) consist of
a) Facilities and Safety
b) Finance
c) Human Resources
d) IT
e) General Management
f) General Overheads
g) Other Income
It is worth noting that the total payroll budget for all the departments that are purely commercial is £1.35 million. Some departments also have “expenses” that are not included in Cost.
Section 6 rather usefully takes each department in turn and considers the total amount that the department makes. This is done by taking income and subtracting cost to give gross profit, and then subtracting labour and expenses to get the total amount made by the department.
The totals made by each of the purely Commercial departments is as follows:
a) Entertainments £143,034
b) Food and Beverage £1,064134
c) Stewarding (£152,052)
d) Retail £56,977
e) Machines £179,327
f) Rents £116,650
g) Marketing (£134,378)
h) Market Research £750
i) Venue Operations (£74,202)
j) Reception (£42,141)
Negative contributions are in brackets.
The total amount made by these purely commercial departments is £1,157,649. (or about £1.2 million if reception is excluded).
The total amount spent by all the purely Non-Commercial departments is as follows:
a) Advice and Democratic Services £161,402
b) Sabbatical Officers £124,729
c) Student Activities £85,288
d) Societies and Sports Federation £90,541
e) Committees and Representation £78.780
These departments run at a total cost of £540,740, so the cost of these departments is easily covered by the block grant of £1 million.
The total amount spent by the departments that are both Commercial and Non-Commercial is as follows:
a) Facilities and Safety £247,994
b) Finance £221,349
c) Human Resources £104,852
d) IT £153,204
e) General Management £97,889
f) General Overheads £699,305
g) Other Income (£21,423)
Negative costs (i.e. income) is in brackets.
With the exception of the “other income” category, and a misc. income of £600 in the I.T. Department, all of the departments that are both commercial and non-commercial have no income, these consists of costs that are borne on behalf of both the commercial and the non-commercial sides of the organisation.
Even if the commercial and non-commercial departments (like Facilities and Safety, Finance and Human Resources) only did any work for non-commercial side, the total contributed by the Commercial side would only be £1.2 million.
If, on the other hand, the departments that are both commercial and non-commercial only did work for the commercial side, the total contributed by the Commercial side would be minus £886k.
It follows that the true monetary contribution of the Commercial side to the non-commercial side is somewhere in the region of minus £886k and plus £1.2 million.
To work out whether the Commercial side makes and contribution at all, and the level of that contribution, it is necessary to make assumptions about how much of the expenditure from the departments that are both commercial and non-commercial should be attributed to commercial activities and non-Commercial activities.
This is what Ross Davidson did in Section 6 (i) of the Budget Pack entitled “Generation of Union Funds”. We know this is the case because he stated:
“In order to get an accurate picture of how much each area of activity costs us, it is necessary to reallocate the cost of Departmental Services between Commercial and Membership Services. In the past, this has been done based on a rule of thumb. This year, a Cost Driver Reallocation basis has been used, where the costs are allocated based on an analysis of what generates the costs. E.g. IT costs are reallocated based on the number of computers in each department.”
He clearly thought that this is an appropriate way to answer the question I am trying to answer because he went on to say:
“This technique allows us to make it abundantly clear that the Union’s Commercial Services produce a substantial surplus to the organisation. This is added to the Annual Allocation from the University, and is used to fund the cost of Membership Services.”
So this technique allows the question of whether the contribution from the commercial side is positive or negative to be solved, and infact shows that the contribution from the commercial side is substantially positive.
Ross Davidson calculated that commercial operations resulted in a net surplus of £334k, or about 7% of sales. And lets face it, a return of 7% of sales is not bad going for any commercial undertaking.
So, the figure of a commercial contribution of somewhat in the region of £3 million is simply not consistent with the Union’s own figures. All the commercial departments put together only yield a net surplus of £1.2 million, without taking into account the costs incurred by the commercial side in departments such as “facilities and safety” and “human resources”.
Note:
There is an argument of economies of scale which can be sensibly made – the idea here is that the whole is worth more than the sum of the component parts. This is slightly superfluous to the discussion of the monetary contribution; however it’s worth investigating to consider what the magnitude of these economies of scale might actually be.
According to Ross Davidson’s estimate the non-commercial side costs about £1.3 million, made up of £1 million from the block grant and £334k from the commercial side.
Now it could be argued that the non-commercial side would incur additional costs if it wasn’t part of the commercial operation, due to cost duplication. For example there would have to be a separate finance department and a separate human resources department. This would mean that the departments that currently provide both commercial services and non-commercial services would have to remain bigger than the amount estimated using the Cost Driver estimation method.
However it doesn’t seem plausible that these departments would have to grow in size if the commercial operations were dispensed with, so the upper limit of the cost of these departments to the non-commercial side would be £1.5 million. Adding this to the costs of the purely non-commercial departments of £540k, means that the total would be about £2 million, and so once the block grant is subtracted it would only be necessary to find £1 million to plug the hole left by removing the commercial services.
Of course, as I pointed out, this is an upper limit of how much the commercial services may be worth using an economies of scale argument, in practice it will be substantially less than this, as it would be possible to reduce the size of many of these departments in practice.
Conclusion:
This examination has told me that the claim that the commercial side gives something close to £3 million to the non-commercial side, a profit of some 70% of takings, is just not substantiated by the Union’s own figures.
The Union’s own budget pack suggests that the actual figure is £334k. A scale economies argument could be used to argue that in practice the figure would be somewhat more like £700k, but it is difficult to see how it could be argued that it is substantially more than that.
As I said at the outset, it could well be argued that commercial services are a good thing in their own right and should be retained on principle, but that is a separate argument.
A couple of final points, yes the Union does set £300k aside for capital expenditure, however this is generally spent on the commercial side (Zippy’s, the Graduate, Café Xanana, Cholo), and not on the non-commercial side at all.
It’s also worth noting that whilst losing the commercial services would downsize the Union, it would not be downsized as far as a sixth form college. How many sixth form colleges have a block grant of over £1 million?
Benny
14 Jun 2005 14:51
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There will be a Public Debate entitled
"Union Commercial Services: Save them or Scrap them?"
on Tuesday 14th June at 4pm in H0.58.
The future of the Union's Commercial Services is a hot topic at the moment, as the Union is currently taking part in the so-called "Leadership Foundation Project" with the University. (This was formerly known as "Devolved Department Negotiations".
The Union's Commercial Services have a turnover of about £5 million and contribute about £300,000 towards the non-commercial services which the Union provides.
Here are two sample arguments to give you a taste of the sorts of things that will be discussed:
Argument for saving the Union's Commercial Services
Historically, the Students' Union fought hard for its independence from the University, and won the right to the Use of Union South in 1974. The £300,000 earned from the Union's Commercial Operations go straight back into services for students. The fact that the Union has this revenue stream means that it is not wholly reliant on the University, and makes the Union less vulnerable to threats to withdraw the block grant. The Union forces the University to keep its prices down by competing in the food and drink market. Because Union South is run by students, for students, the facilities can be used for what students' want. Students can have a real say on how the Union's Commercial Services are run through the democratic processes, as was demonstrated by the decisions taken about fair trade hot drinks. Therefore we should save the Union's Commercial Services.
Argument for scrapping the Union's Commercial Services
Running commercial services is by definition a risky undertaking, and as the Union's surplus tends to only be around £20,000 even a small deterioration of profits from the commercial side could leave the Union in financial ruin. The University would probably be happy to compensate the Union for the £300,000 lost if the Union let it take over the Commercial Services. The Union currently has a large incentive to tacitly collude with the University in the food and drink markets, which prevents the Union campaigning against the University's high prices. There is no reason why the Union's Commercial services could not be run by the University or the private sector, and they may thrive from being freed from democratic pressures. Students can make little difference about how commercial services are run as they are forever being warned that proposed policy is financially unviable. The staff-student protocol prevents discussion in Union meetings about how the Commercial Services are being run, and this is an unacceptable infringement on freedom of speech. Therefore, we should scrap the Union's Commercial Services.
As the Union is so fond of saying, come and have your say!
4pm, Tuesday, H0.58.
Be there.
Benny
11 Jun 2005 21:00
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Well my blog is back online for the next two weeks before it is ruthlessly shut down for non-payment of a WGA subscription.
I'll be talking a bit about the new disciplinary regulations in a future entry, as I was not allowed to complete my remarks at the executive committee meeting at which they were passed, and I believe there are serious freedom of speach issues about the regulations that need to be considered.
For those who are interested in the John Cross case, I can confirm that the matter is currently being considered by the University Registrar.
Benny
11 Jun 2005 20:12
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I am suspending my blog until 28th May to concentrate on my exams.
In particular I will not be commenting on the John Cross case until this time.
I will also not be doing any further work on this case or campaigning on the subject of the Union Disciplinary Regulations during this period.
Benny
06 May 2005 23:06
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Writing about web page http://www.johncrossisinnocent.tk
John's appeal is confirmed for next Tuesday, when the Union will have to decide whether to confirm its position of taking action against a student whom it accepts didn't break the constitution, its appendicies and regulations, didn't break the staff-student protocol and didn't break the law.
I am still baffled as to how the first hearing found that no rules had been breached, and yet still found John guilty. Surely if no rules are breached at all, that means no action should be taken against you?
You can read the verdict here
In other news Union Council passed a policy expressing concerns about the disciplinary regulations last night. There was suggestions that it was personally motivated – I can confirm that I personally believed that we should pass that policy.
Incidently, the Sabbaticals claimed that it was constitutional to expel members from the Students' Union and that they had received legal advice on this subject.
We have to follow the Constitution, unless the law means it would be illegal for us to do so.
The Constitution states:
_4.1 The following will be members of the Union:
(a) Full members: All registered students of the University except those who exercise their right not to be a member under section 22 (2) (c) of the Education Act 1994. Sabbatical Officers of the Union will be full members of the Union_
It is clear from this statement that if you are a registered student of the University, you are a member of the Union. So taking the Constituion on its own (ignoring the law), the Union cannot expel its own members.
Now the question is, is this section of the Constitution illegal? If it is, the Sabbaticals should inform the University Council immediately that it
has approved an illegal Constitution for our Union.
Otherwise, they are wrong.
I hope that the disciplinary regulations are rewritten as soon as possible to meet some of the concerns that were expressed yesturday. We are in a situation where a member has been found guilty for breaking no rules at all. That is certainly unacceptable, it is questionable whether it is legal. Although I have no legal expertise, it seems to me that whilst it is legal for a membership organisation to impose sanctions on its members for breaking its rules, it seems doubtful whether it is legal for a membership organisation to impose sanctions for not breaking any rules.
Even though I think the Sabbaticals are wrong, I respect each and every one of them, because I know that they are doing what they think is right. I am also doing what I think is right, and I make no apology for standing up for what I believe in.
Benny
06 May 2005 22:48
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Well as had been decided some time ago the Union Disciplinary found John Cross guilty this afternoon at about 5.30 pm.
Most of the investigating Officer's report, such as the bits about annonymous questions, were disregarded as irrelevant, but the fact that the irrelevant evidence was ignored isn't a lot of consolation, if the panel then convicts on the basis of no evidence.
It turned out that the action was being brought under the 11th ground for disciplinary action:
Any behaviour which causes a student, guest or staff member to lodge a complaint.
Yes, that's right, if you take any action which causes someone to lodge a complaint, that in itself is a grounds for a disciplinary. It could be walking into Cholo, tying your shoelace, speaking on Union business, casting a vote… any action at all is grounds for a disciplinary.
It was accepted by the panel that John didn't break the constitution, its appendicies, regulations, the staff-student protocol or the law. And yet a disciplinary was proceeding because a member of staff had complained.
Union Council is going to consider whether we should have a new set of disciplinary regulations, which would stop this kind of nonsense happening. I hope they give the current regulations the vote of no confidence they deserve.
Incidently John was finally convicted of causing offence to a member of staff and of compounding this offence by not retracting his statement. He was never told that he was being tried for causing offence at any point during the proceedings.
Maybe Simon Lucas was right to tell John to stop wasting time by persistantly asking for a copy of the charges. After all, if the charges can change just before the verdict is announced, what would be the point of looking at them at all?
Now John's been ordered to apologise and clarify his remarks to Union Council. It's difficult to see why he would want to do either of those things, so it seems that the only thing the Union has acheived today is to waste everybody's time.
Benny
04 May 2005 23:54
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So, its the day of John Corss's disciplinary hearing.
The schedule today looks set to be as follows:
1230 – Demonstrate outside Union North to protest about this disciplinary action.
1430 – Hearing begins.
Later – John found guilty by panel.
Tommorow's schedule includes
Before 1600 – John lodges appeal against guilty verdict.
1900 – Union Council meeting in S0.21 to give the disciplinary regulations a vote of no confidence – all welcome.
04 May 2005 09:26
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Don't miss the public meeting on Union Censorship that is being held today at 6.15pm in R1.13.
It will be a great chance to discuss freedom of speach in our Union, in relation to the disciplinary regulations, the media codes of conduct, and the staff-student protocol.
All are welcome.
03 May 2005 09:40
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