NUS Affiliation Fee Review Consultation DayRegistration for this event will begin at 10.30am and not 9.30am as originally stated. The event will begin at 11.15am.
NUS Finance Committee is a body established by Annual Conference to oversee NUS’ financial affairs. It is formally independent from the management and NEC of NUS and this year has strengthened its processes and oversight of the organisation.
As you may be aware the committee this year is reviewing the method by which students’ union affiliation fees are calculated. This letter sets out the process by which we will be conducting the review and shows how you can feed into the consultation. While the status quo has not been entirely ruled out, Finance Committee strongly believes that we can develop a new system that is fairer and simpler- and that this is an urgent task.
In the attached document we give more details of the process of consultation, but it is important we point out right away that to enable NUS to work out the implications of different ways of calculating the affiliation fee, all unions with a turnover of £5,000 or more need to submit a true picture of the grant they receive from their institution.
There are two ways you can do this – by either submitting a set of the most recent audited accounts you have, or by getting a letter of verification from your institution. We need to get these figures back within 10 days so we can start to feed them into a paper on different models being produced. We can of course use HESA or LSC figures to get an accurate picture of student numbers.
We recognise that for those whose figures are out of date then you may be frightened of NUS requiring a significant increase in your affiliation fee for this year. This will not automatically be the case. Finance Committee has agreed in several cases to a stepped approach to any increases and furthermore will look very carefully at any hardship requests should it be determined that your union should be paying higher affiliation fees this year
For many years NUS has been calculating affiliation fees based on incorrect figures, for a combination of reasons. However, rather than engage in a lengthy and pointless debate about the past Finance Committee is determined to move forward and come up with a new system which is built around the following six principles:-
- Transparency
- Ability of unions to pay
- Simple to calculate
- Fairness and comparisons of “like with like”
- Flexibility for unions experiencing hardship
- The new system must be regularly reviewed
NUS Finance Committee also believes that the new system should seek to keep the current maximum and minimum rates in place and should generate roughly the same income as the current methodology. To be clear about this we are not intending to use this as an opportunity to grow total income that we currently receive from affiliation fees by anything other than inflation (currently approximately £4m). Please refer to the attached paper for further details of the review we’re conducting.
Affiliation fee review notes
We greatly hope you’ll be able to attend a consultation day we’re holding on this on 5th December in London. At the meeting on the 5th December we hope to have much more detail about the implications of the possible models being looked at and hope that at least one person from your union will be able to attend (you should consider sending the appropriate student officer and a senior staff member). Registration will begin at 10.30am and the meeting will start formally at 11.15am.
NUS Finance Committee is working very closely with Matt Hyde, NUS’ newly appointed Deputy National Director. As most of you will be aware Matt has recently left Goldsmiths SU, and shares NUS Finance Committee members’ concerns that local unions who have gone though tough financial times recently should not have additional burdens placed upon them through increased affiliation fees.
Finance Committee knows too that NUS is currently doing everything it can to reduce any areas of waste, and that the vastly improved financial systems at NUS make monitoring and control of expenditure much easier than in the past.
Kind regards,
Graham Gaskell
Chair of NUS Finance Committee
To register for this event please visit our online registration portal: http://www.regonline.co.uk/eventinfo.asp?EventId=113363
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