For the past year or so, I've been asking the RSGB to publish full details of the General Manager's pay packet.
This started with questions about the former GM, Graham Coomber's remuneration. A reply from the society, justifying the pay, claimed Coomber was in early in the mornings answering e-mails, and out late at night and the weekends in meetings.
Of course, running a big society, even if it is a hobby society, does carry many responsibilities and there is a fair amount of work to get through.
The central question, though, is this: does being a GM of a hobby society, paid for almost exclusively by its members' subscriptions, justify a salary of, well - there's the rub - we don't know how much he's paid!
What we can say from statutory accouting rules is that for some time, the salary has been "more than £60,000". According to this 2013 post, and allowing for the fact that inflation has been essentially flat-lining since, that takes Steve Thomas's known salary into the top 5% of UK earners. Quite a pay packet!
Don't get me wrong. I don't mind someone earning a good salary for a hard day's work. But without full transparency, you can't have full accountability. If a poll of RSGB members were conducted with them knowing the full salary, then perhaps they might approve. Or not.
Given we, the members, pay for the GM's salary, I think he should waive his right to a hidden salary, and publish it with each accounts. There is absolutely nothing, other than his consent, that stands in the way of that happening.
Graham Coomber and his merry men weren't willing to make this disclosure when I asked a couple of times.
Now, with a new man - Steve Thomas - at the reins, it's a great shame that he, too, seems perfectly happy to keep the exact amount of money we pay him secret. I've asked him directly, even advising him that silence would be taken as unwillingness to disclose - and there's been no reply (unlike over other matters, which he's always replied to.)
So I was very disappointed to see this 'keeping mum' continue at RadCom.
I sent in a letter in the same kind of vein as this post, highlighting that, even at the cut-off point of £60,000 for a full declaration, this was over 2.5 times the salary of a time-served NHS nurse, who I think most people would agree put in a very hard day's work.
That the letter was not published might be simply down to the volume of letters received. Or, as I tend to think, it might indicate that the RSGB continues to be unwilling to make the full salary known, especially when emotively - but accurately - compared to our treasured nurses. A month later, RadCom is still failing to publish the letter. I doubt it ever will publish it.
Having recently rejoined the society precisely because I felt Steve Thomas was a more practical, out-there-in-the-field sort of man, I now feel rather hoodwinked.
Mr. Thomas has shown no sign yet of accepting the validity of my argument, and the membership don't yet seem to be adding any pressure. That's probably because most RSGB members don't take an active interest, but simply pay their dues "for the magazine". That's a standard response whenever you start talking about the RSGB with fellow hams. Update: Last week (of the 6th February 2017), Steve Thomas stated that he published his remuneration in line with accounting rules. In other words, he rejects the argument that he should state his full salary to the members.
Mind you, looking at the half-yearly accounts for the RSGB this month, which reveals a deficit of over £13,000 (up substantially on the 2015 figure), one might hope that pressure will start to build. Why are we paying full commercial pay rates for a hobby society's GM when income is falling, and we know there are membership and thus money troubles straight ahead?
Whilst the RSGB itself is not a UK registered charity, the Radio Communications Foundation (RCF), which has a contact address at the RSGB HQ, is. The RCF is legally distinct from the RSGB, and the GM of the RSGB has no role, or at least one that needs to be declared, in the RCF, although at least one other staff member (given as Marilyn Slade on 19/9/2016) of the RSGB is directly involved in both organisations. But, all the same, the two bodies are clearly initmately interwoven, so who could argue with the kind of arguments contained in this report on senior officer pay, and that it ought to apply to member-funded hobby societies, too? The word 'trust' is important, I think...
In respect of the deficit, I think the RSGB is beginning to show panic. It latched on to one year as being a cash cow by selling more books. A summer-only voucher scheme has now been extended in order to lever some more dosh out of members' pockets. It seems from the accounts that the tired, repeated content of many of these books isn't persuading many to reach into those pockets.
The worry I have now is that the RSGB has become blinkered and lost for ideas on how to keep its bottom line healthy, and I'm not persuaded that a "roughly break-even" final accounts, as the RSGB again says it expects, will actually transpire. The whole idea, indeed, of a 'break-even' seems fatally flawed when we know the post-war Baby Boomers are reaching the end of their lives, and following generations aren't taking an interest in radio. A cash crisis in the near future is really the only realistic expectation from this situation.
And, to cap it all, as I have boringly and repeatedly pointed out, the failed venture that is the National Radio Centre - otherwise known as a luxuriously-appointed club station for a handful of RSGB bigwigs, increasingly continues to cost the RSGB dearly - over £18,000 this year and up £1000 over last year, and apparently without taking depreciation of assets into account.
How much money the NRC makes for the RSGB is unknown, at least beyond the RSGB office, because there is no specific entry for that. But it's probably nowhere near enough to break even, let alone make a surplus.
The claim that the NRC has inspired "many" new entrants into the hobby has, to my knowledge, never been proven with real numbers. If it is true, then the RSGB also seems never to have gone on to show us how many of those "inspired" by the NRC have translated into new society members. We can only realistically expect it is a tiny number, entirely unworthy of the money spent at the NRC.
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