Dear Andy,

If I may I would like to take a little more time to answer your latest email as it raises some pertinent points but you are right, I’m extremely busy and probably more so than I have been in my previous 25 years as a senior manager and director in the chemicals industry….so I’m all for reducing bureaucracy! I have just spent the weekend attending and speaking at the UK Congress and you will possibly be interested to learn that I spent last Saturday in Glasgow as part of the Road Running Working Group which is looking seriously at the expansion in road running and how more focus and benefit may be given to this aspect of the sport. I’ve attached the recent press release from the Group– I hasten to add that this is neither from England Athletics or UKA which are two legally separate entities. I’d welcome any comments which you may have.

I am also a volunteer in that I am a level 3 time-keeper and it was through my involvement in the sport that I came to accept the role of setting up England Athletics as defined through the Foster Review. Unfortunately, I am finding that the demands of the job are in conflict with me following my spare time activity of time-keeping for Stratford upon Avon AC as I am frequently required to support other events in a professional capacity.

The point made in my previous email is that England Athletics is now one body and not represented by three territories, therefore we are unifying the three existing affiliation schemes into one scheme. With such a disparity in the existing schemes clubs in the North, Midlands and South will be affected in different ways. For some clubs it will mean lower payments while for others such as yours payments are likely to increase dependent upon numbers of competing athletes. Picking up your point about insurance, it may interest you to know that the territories do not currently contribute to the governing body’s insurance bill of some £250,000…..but this is still a cost which must be paid.

The fee of £3 per competing athlete and £50 flat fee for a club for the year 1^st April 2007 to 31^st March 2008 is not simply an edict from England Athletics. This has been agreed by the England Athletics Council the body democratically elected by the member clubs. The rationale in setting these levels is that in relative terms, we are still an inexpensive sport in terms of affiliation and the monies gained from affiliation will expand financial capacity of the sport in that it is raised from the athletes with a lower financial burden (£50) being placed upon the clubs. These monies will flow back into the sport for development of athletes through the regions.

Picking up your Tesco example. There are many individuals who contribute to organisations and bodies such as the National Trust at fees up to and upward of £50 - £60 per year, yet they never visit a property or make full use of their membership. They join because they believe that they are contributing to a worthwhile activity which enriches the experience of others and future generations. I believe that England Athletics in its aim to expand the capacity of the sport (club membership, quality of experience in the sport, numbers and quality of coaches and officials) and to improve performance in every event, at every age group and in every region is such a cause.

Ultimately it is a decision for your club whether or no to affiliate. If you decide not to affiliate then I feel this would be a lose – lose scenario. If you decide to affiliate and also engage with the England Athletics development activity then this may prove a win-win.

Whatever is your decision I wish you and your club well for the future.

Kind regards,

Alan Harrison.

Dr Alan Harrison

Chief Executive - England Athletics

Tel. 0792 0078541

From: Andy & Wendy Leslie [mailto:Andy_Leslie@UK2.net]
Sent: 25 November 2006 14:46
To: aharrison@englandathletics.org
Cc: cbenning@englandathletics.org
Subject: RE: England Athletics Affiliation

Dear Alan,

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I understand that, as Chief Exec, you’re busy and I appreciate you making the effort.

I have written to address these issues with you as I think that you should be aware of the impact to clubs such as ours – the view from the bottom is less clear than that from the top! This feedback is directly generated by your letter of 20^th October.

Remember, we’re not a T&F club. We see none of the T&F benefits that accrue from UK:A. We do road and cross-country races. We have members who run marathons in sub 2:45 as well as those who finish “eventually”. Our equipment is minimal, our needs are less than T&F clubs.

Sorry, but saying that our fees should go up because they’re already higher in the North & Midlands etc is invalid. If you are propounding the view that we were actually subsidised by clubs in those areas, I find this difficult to believe without a breakdown of insurance costs. The SEAA has still got vast amounts of money sitting in bank accounts, which surely would have been used up were we truly under-contributing. Insurance is the most obvious tangible benefit of affiliation that we are aware of. If the subsidy argument is explicitly put forward, given the numbers of runners in the south, I’d think that fees in the North & Midlands should go down somewhat when this scheme is implemented. Is that the case?

Here’s some detailed input on the impact of this new system.

Impact upon events of the new fees

We organise the Yateley 10K Races, a highly successful 3-race series in the summer months with over 1000 entrants for each race. So let’s take these as a worked example. On the entry forms, we ask if the runner belongs to an affiliated club. It seems that we will now have to ask if the runner is registered as affiliated as well as the club. I hope you realise that it’s already difficult to confirm if any club quoted on the entry form is affiliated, and now it’ll be impossible to know if the runner is, either. Worse still, he could be running for his second / third claim club which isn’t affiliated, but he is, as an individual, with another club. What do we do then?

This level of complexity is going to get us hopelessly entangled and will not be viable.

Impact upon road running clubs and their members

Let us say that Joe Bloggs is a typical member of our club. At present he pays £15 per annum to join up as a member and gets all the benefits of running with like-minded people and – very important to some - saves £2 in unaffiliated fees every race. He already has to enter 8 races or more in a year, to save money – but of course he gets tangible benefits from the club (such as a Newsletter, organised social and race-related activities, etc.), so he remains a member. This hike in fees means he will pay an extra £3 in 2007/8 and £5 per annum from April 1 2008. So he now only saves money if he runs more than 9 races in 2007/8 and more than 10 in 2008/9. He can take one of three decisions:

Pay up, beaming happily.
Don’t bother joining the club. All he pays for is the unaffiliated fees for races that he wishes to run.
Tell us he’s not a competing member and then decide to run anyway saying (truthfully) to race organisers that he belongs to an affiliated club.

Option 1 is obviously desirable; however our Committee has to be able to point out what he gets for the money. I note that your email doesn’t point to any additional applicable benefits for the additional money. This is a fundamental problem. In my first email I pointed out that, when we get to our AGM, you are asking the Committee to stand up and defend this increase in fees when we cannot point to any additional benefit. When was the last time you went into Tesco, gave them your money and left without anything in your shopping bags? If they put the price of a can of beans up by 300%, with no corresponding increase in quality or quantity, would you buy them? I think not.

Option 2 will lose us members. There’s a financial tipping point for the decision to join or leave a club and some will feel this increase is it, especially when we cannot point to any additional tangible benefit that they will see as a result.

Option 3 may be described as dishonest, but hey, this is the real world. Unless we turn into the Race Police – and I assure you no Club Official wants to be seen in that light – we have no way of knowing what a member puts on a race entry form. Many people join and in the first year say they doubt they’ll run in races as yet. If they change their mind halfway through the year, Club Officials are the people who have to immediately demand more money on your behalf.

Ours, like 99% of road running clubs, is run by a small number of dedicated people who perform their duties in their spare time. We are not professionals, paid for our duties. We spend hundreds of hours a year already with running the club and associated events. We don’t need more work piled upon us from above.

We affiliated to save on race fees for our members and to be part of the great road running adventure sweeping our country in 1987.

As a road running club, we see very little from UK:A /EA that even refers to our sport – and yet the numbers of non-track runners grows daily and, I’ll bet, far exceeds the number of adult track & field competitors.

As you suggested, I have cc’d the Interim Sub-Regional Manager for our area, Chris Benning. I have attached my original email and your reply in order that she can follow the conversation.

To summarise, if you want clubs such as ours “on side”, I believe that UK:A / EA need to

Issue a “Summary Of Benefits of Affiliation for non-Track & Field Clubs” including a major section on “Where your fees go” (email or the web will do, please don’t send out another glossy booklet)
Include a section on “what your additional affiliation fees will fund”
Simplify the bureaucracy. Please.

I hope, that as a result of these emails, you and those involved with this decision will revisit it with consideration taken of retaining the loyalty of affiliated non-T&F clubs.

Please feel free to continue this conversation or hand it on to Chris Benning.

Best regards,

Andy Leslie

Publicity Secretary, Sandhurst Joggers

E: Publicity@sandhurstjoggers.org.uk

W: www.SandhurstJoggers.Org.UK

H: 01344 772894

M: 07976 209330

P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

PS For some time now we have been contacting UK:A IT folk about the fact that, if you put our post code (GU47 9AU) into the UK:A Website form to “find your local club”, our club name doesn’t come up, even though it is the registered address of the club! We’ve never gotten a reply despite using the forms etc from the website. Can you ask that this is fixed?

From: Alan Harrison [mailto:aharrison@englandathletics.org]
Sent: 24 November 2006 17:43
To: 'Andy & Wendy Leslie'
Subject: England Athletics Affiliation

Dear Andy & Wendy,

You were correct in your guess at my email address. Thank you for your email.

You will appreciate that England Athletics Ltd. took over governance of the sport from the AAA’s and the three territories, North, Midlands, and South, from 1^st April 2006. In bringing together a single, unified, affiliation fee scheme for the sport of athletics, careful consideration was given to the three existing schemes, two of which include a per capita charge. Under a unified scheme, the increase in cost for those clubs in the South would always be an issue as under the existing territory affiliation schemes both the North and Midlands clubs pay significantly more to affiliate to their territories than clubs in the South. It is for this reason that after consultation with the England Athletics Council, the volunteer body elected by the member clubs, due consideration was given to the clubs in the South and the per capita fee for competing athletes in England was reduced to £3 for the coming year 1^st April 2007 to 31^st March 2008.

I note you quote your membership as being 211 people. Are all of these members competing athletes wishing to take part in competition organised under UK:A rules? If not then a payment of £3 would only be due from those athletes wishing to compete in such competition along with the “flat” club fee of £50. I can confirm that a competing athlete will only be required to pay £3 - regardless of how many clubs they join. Surely on this basis a competing athlete would only have to enter 2 races as an otherwise unattached runner to make affiliation worthwhile?

As well as eligibility to compete under the rules of the sport, there are other benefits associated with affiliation. These include insurance cover for club coaches and officials, access to development activity through the England Athletics regional staff and elected regional councils along with provision of funding for development. Health and safety and risk assessment are managed through the governing body, as are welfare, disciplinary and eligibility activities and rules development for the sport.

I would urge that you engage with your local England Athletics Regional Manager to highlight specific issues where England Athletics in the region may be able to help your club.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Harrison.

Dr Alan Harrison

Chief Executive - England Athletics

From: Andy & Wendy Leslie [mailto:andy.leslie@andyleslie.com]
Sent: 23 November 2006 21:00
To: John Temperton
Subject: UK:A Afilliation Fees

Dear John,

I’m contacting you on behalf of my club, Sandhurst Joggers, following Alan Harrison’s letter of 20^th October and a telephone conversation with your EA colleague Nigel Bailey about the announced increases in affiliation fees. Nigel suggested I email you for more detailed information than he could give. I’ve cc’d both Nigel and Alan Harrison, although I’ve had to guess at Alan’s email address – if it’s incorrect perhaps you will be kind enough to pass this on.

A bit of background – we are a 20-year-old road running club with more than 200 members. We organise three 10K road races in the summer and participate in many other road races throughout the year as well as a cross-country league in the autumn/winter.

Our committee members are at a loss to understand the raison d’etre for increasing affiliation fees by such a huge margin.

Our calculations show that the breakdown of fees paid / to be paid by us for 211 members is as follows:

2006/7 £ 240.00 (SEAA) (plus £60 approx. for 1/1/7-31/3/7)

2007/8 £ 683.00 (UK:A) (1/4/7-1/4/8)

2008/9 £1105.00 (UK:A) (1/4/9-1/4/9)

We are aware of little or no relevant input from UK:A or EA, which seem to be oriented almost exclusively to Track & Field. In common with many road running clubs the length and breadth of England, we don’t participate in T&F events as a club and have few if any members that do so now or in fact ever have at all.

So then, a few straight questions

1) What do we get next year more than we get today?

2) What do we get even more of the year after?

3) What exactly do road-running clubs like ours get for their money?*

4) If this is an individual levy as stated, please confirm that it will not be levied on the same person if they belong to multiple clubs.

*If the answer to (3) is “insurance cover”, then please explain what part of our activities has caused our insurance premium to have gone up so much? We’ve never claimed on this and never heard of a local club that has had to do so.

Our current annual membership fee is £15 which covers our costs, but no more. When our AGM takes place, no current Committee member feels able to stand up and recommend these increases in club fees as it seems there is no tangible benefit to the club. We are already fielding questions about why our members may be asked to pay 33% more than previously.

In the past our club has affiliated and described this as a benefit due to the costs of unaffiliated race fees. With this declaration of new fees, I believe you risk losing the sympathy of almost any non-T&F road running (or otherwise off-track) running club. Certainly our AGM will look for clear information as to why we should once more affiliate.

The letter of the 20^th October simply said “this is what you will pay” with no explanation as to why, your colleague Nigel Bailey said, quite succinctly, on the phone, “take it or leave it”.

Please tell us why we shouldn’t “leave it” – here’s your opportunity.