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1 Agm 2020 Questions Put to the Agm Panel by Members AGM 2020 QUESTIONS PUT TO THE AGM PANEL BY MEMBERS AND ATTENDEES ANSWERS ARE IN BLUE Q. How many subscribed members does the trust have? Roughly? A. The Trust currently has 25,400 members and friends. Q. What impact has Covid had on external funding streams in the new financial year? e.g. the proportion of total income affected? And how will any reduction affect your plans? Broad thoughts only. A. At the beginning of the year, we estimated the impact of coronavirus restrictions on the Trust as we had to cease face to face fundraising and various activities. We were anticipating a drop in income of around £480k when we first looked at this. However, we were able to take advantage of the government furlough scheme and other emergency grants such as that provided by the National Lottery Heritage fund. We have made various cuts in expenditure and thanks to you, our members, our membership income remained strong. As a result of all of this we are forecasting ending the year 2020/21 in line with our original budget. Q. Many charities appear to be getting ever increased levels of restricted donations. Is this something the Trust is concerned about? A. Not really, we have a healthy balance of restricted and unrestricted funds within the Trust. We keep an eye on this to ensure we have a robust and diverse range of different income streams. Q. Why is the Trust not selling Christmas merchandise (cards, calendars, gifts etc) online, as so many other organisations are this year? This seems a lost opportunity. A. We took a decision even before the Coronavirus crisis hit that we would stop producing the calendar. Over the course of the last few years sales and interest in this product had decreased to the point where the calendar was costing the Trust money in terms of staff resource to produce and distribute. Although it was a difficult decision at the time it is always important that we think carefully about how we spend money to bring the biggest benefit to the Trust. Our early decision was helpful in the sense that we simply would not have had the resource to fulfil this in the light of Covid. The resource required for the return on investment for merchandise such as calendars and cards is significant and the Trust decided to channel this into other areas of fundraising and profile building. Q. Who do you bank with? A. Unity Bank. Q. What is your financial reserves policy? A. The Trust’s Reserves Policy is to hold 4 months of unrestricted reserves, which currently equates to around £1.25m. 1 Q. Do you plan to leave the investments where they are as one presumes they are recovering? A. Yes, we do. The investments have shown an unrealised gain of £166k to the end of September 2020. We recently moved our investments to a climate-friendly ethical investment fund with CCLA. Q. Have you any guidance on how Corporations can invest in companies that are supporting wildlife, or how they can invest in wilding with a look to achieving a return for their investors? A. We are starting to explore investment models and this could be something that is available in future. Q. Looking forward, what do you see as the biggest challenge for the Trust as you enter your 60th year? A. Scaling up activity to match the severity of the ecological and climate crisis. Q. Is the 30% of land and sea target 30% of each, or is it for example 15% and 15% or any combination totalling 30%? A. 30% of land and 30% of sea. https://www.hiwwt.org.uk/our-strategy Q. With regard to your excellent Wilder strategy, is the multiplicity of conservation NGOs (such as RSPB, Butterfly Conservation, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, species-specific and generalist) a help or a hinderance when it comes to influencing decision makers in local and national government? A. It is very helpful and we would go further and say that it is vital that we collaborate. As NGOs we are all part of Green Alliance and Wildlife and Countryside Link (Link) which provide a mechanism for collaboration on influencing government policy. Q. I work for Wightlink Ferries. We are proud to work with you by welcoming Marine Champions on board our crossings. They inspire our customers and staff with fascinating facts about marine wildlife. My question - how many local companies do you work with as it’s such a great way to connect with the community? A. We currently have 35 Corporate Members, as well as several other partnerships with other businesses such as Southern Co-Op, DP World, Vitacress and Hildon Water. This is an area of fundraising that we are developing so if anyone is connected to a local business and would like to make an introduction for us please contact [email protected] . Q. What are your plans for Deacon Hill in Winchester? A. The Trust will be erecting fencing and corrals to enable grazing and will be installing a couple of benches and a viewing platform over the next few months. We would like to see grazing reintroduced this winter. Over the longer term we will need to carry out a programme of scrub management in conjunction with the grazing regime to restore the hill to former glories. 2 Q. How much has “bad behaviour” on our nature reserves cost us, e.g. in staff time? Q. How much does it cost the trust to clear litter and rubbish dumped at nature reserves? Q. During the first lockdown and since, we have seen anti-social behaviour at the Tern Hide car park located at Blashford Lakes! Can you please advise what is being done to prevent and stop this going forward, and when this car park will return to normal? Q. My question was about the anti-social behaviours shown at different nature reserves at the end of lockdown: After the important media coverage featuring HIWWT about this issue (TV interview, social media posts etc), did you see a decrease of the negative impact on the reserves afterwards? A. It is difficult to give a definitive answer regarding the total costs of addressing anti-social behaviour because much of the overall cost was in the Officer time that was needed to clear up after the problems (and which, of course, meant staff resource was diverted away from other more wildlife-focused work). A rough estimate of direct costs, i.e. the removal of litter, repairs to fencing and gates etc, would be that the Trust spent circa £10,000 on addressing these issues over the summer. If we factor in staff time then the costs were probably well over double that figure. Unfortunately the only thing that appeared to reduce anti-social behaviour this summer was the arrival of the colder weather. Next year we are planning to increase our presence on the ground at a number of sites where pressure was particularly acute, we will also be aiming to increase our presence earlier in the year in an attempt to address problems before they get out of hand. Q. How are you balancing ambitions to acquire new sites with making sure you can employ enough staff with appropriate skills and expertise to manage them, plus the resources more generally to do the necessary conservation work? I ask this as I am aware of members who are far more experienced than me who worry about existing sites that they feel have deteriorated in recent years, partly through lack of resources and/or the right expertise. A. We would be interested to know which sites people feel have deteriorated as we regularly monitor sites, both in house and via a long-term contract with Hampshire Biodiversity Information Centre (HBIC), and we are not picking up any trends within the data that suggests sites are going downhill. If there are specific areas of concern please do let us know. Having said that some sites are challenging to manage and recruiting the right people is not always easy with the price of housing in our two counties being a particular stumbling block for some potential job applicants. The funding for nature reserve management is going to be under pressure when we leave the EU and we are developing alternative funding streams that we hope will enable us to continue to resource our reserve management at the appropriate level. Q. Connected with the previous question, how do you monitor and assess reserves to ensure you achieve continuous improvements for nature on each site? And how do you decide what the ‘right’ improvements are given that there are often conflicting conservation priorities? A. Monitoring on our reserves falls into a number of categories. We carry out regular species monitoring across our estate, looking at butterflies and birds in particular as part of national programmes. We also commission specific surveys for important groups on a more ad hoc basis. Botanically we carry out annual rapid condition monitoring in-house, this follows a standard methodology and provides a fairly rapid indication of the condition of different habitats types. We also commission HBIC to carry out a rolling 3 programme of more in-depth surveys of our sites; as well as including an assessment of condition these provide an external validation to our in-house surveys. Q. Great to see the real progress during lockdown, despite the problems of people not observing requirements. But how are you planning to cope with the aftermath, when vaccination is enabling a return to work? Doesn’t this imply a low priority for activities such as yours’ in the face of panic to get people back to work/funding priorities elsewhere, plus of course even more irresponsible behaviour from newly “liberated” people.
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