As you may of noticed I am a little behind on the blog front. I thought I would use the Christmas holiday to write a series of blogs based around the overly grand theme of “the state of the union” or at least my opinion of what needs to be done both as national and local unions to improve our campaigning and ensure that we are around in the future to continue this work.

Financing a stronger student movement

For my first blog in this series I thought it would be useful to concentrate on the subject of union finances, exploring some of the challenges that we are currently facing and those we are about to face. And taking a look at some of the different options that we have to resolve pending and current financial difficulties.

I had a brief argument with Sophie Buckland, who was angry that the NEC wasn’t mobilising campaigns on a local level to increase block grants for students unions, whilst not sitting in the pocket of VC’s.

Where Universities and Colleges can afford to grant more money to students unions it is in their interest to do so. Good Students’ unions can add significant value for money, effectively activating volunteers within the institution to champion institutional identity and improve rates of student recruitment and retention. This is fine as a means to increase your block grant but the problem with solely focussing on the increase in block grants is that we risk as a movement falling into paternalistic relationships with home institutions.

Ever since I started as a finance and activities officer (bizarre combination I know), my first NUSSL convention was focussed on the decline of commercial revenue in local students’ unions. Blamed on tuition fees, mobile phones and a growing coffee culture we were too slow to react to; bar sales have declined year on year and any union bucking this trend will only be doing this for the next year or so. The bigger risk we face as a national union (both NUS and NUSSL as one), is that as we sell less beer, the value of the bulk discount will be reduced and the benefit of national bargaining will be seriously damaged. We can no longer look to the bar to provide our income.

Strategically it is better that as a movement that we focus on diversified income streams, on developing our fundraising capacity on both local and national levels, and understanding a need to relinquish our dependency on commercial income. This is why I am 100% behind NUS extra, which provides an alternative income stream for SU’s whilst providing value for money in the form of a new service for students.

Those unions who anticipated and acted upon declines in bar trade have gone through a good deal of heartache; cutting budgets, outsourcing services and making staff redundant. These are the all things I saw in my own students’ union and I am not alone in this. Some students’ unions will not of taken these decisions and will have run up huge deficits that will limit their future development and will limit their capacity to neutralise financial and organisational risk.

So what options are there? Charging for non core membership functions (housing offices and job shops for example), increasing the take up of NUS extra, greater scrutiny of the trading functions (particularly the price of products they stock), reducing environmental/ utilities waste or increase the funding streams that they have by applying for project funding from; charities, local authorities, governmental agencies and the voluntary and third sector. The truth is, no one of these options will reduce the risk to the organisation, the question for student officers and for NUS is, how do we ensure continual scrutiny over the finances of our unions.

The other option is students’ unions disaffiliate from the NUS, my fear is that we are quick becoming the national union of referendums, as such we need to reform the affiliation fee structures of the National Union. In December in my role as a member of finance committee I attended an affiliation fee review day, the turnout was good (evenly split between officers and general managers), the event demonstrated that the increasing tone of engagement, even amongst extremely pro NUS unions, is that the affiliation fee is too high for the services that we provide specific to them. The overwhelming cry is better services at lower cost. There is a legitimate demand from some quarters for us to reduce affiliation fees as we see increased income from NUS extra. I am opposed to this strategy, as I believe it will only be a short-term solution and that there is a more pressing question for us; what services do students’ unions want for us.

I won’t go much further at this stage, this is already quite long for a blog, and there are other areas of the NUS that need just as much attention as the finances; namely it’s organisational culture and it’s governance. I would like to say though that this years NEC has taken some very bold and important steps to turn back the destructive tide of change but the people who have control at the end of the day are students. This year more than ever it is critical that you support the NEC and help them change NUS for the good.

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/davecharlesworth/273696.aspx