At the latest board meeting held yesterday (Thursday), the Trust board unanimously approved a change to its openness policy. The reasons for this change are explained below.
Bees United is entering a significant new phase in its life, and increasingly we are dealing with major external corporations. Being seen as professional and confidential is therefore ever more critical to the success of BU, as is providing visibility to our members of the progress being achieved, and allowing members to understand how their elected representatives are performing. In order to take these objectives into account the Board has therefore revised some of its internal workings to make us more efficient and more effective.
The Openness Policy has been updated to give the board flexibility as to how it communicates with our members – this has recently been applied in practice, so in this respect we are formalising current reality. We are also incorporating a specific comment on how we expect board members to balance the principles of collective responsibility and confidentiality with the need for members to understand how individuals vote and deliver on election commitments. This gives Board members the ability to confirm to members how they vote, and we hope that the new policy will provide individuals with the flexibility to make appropriate decisions as circumstances demand.
Also, rather than have a standard agenda including public and confidential items the Trust will revert to a standard agenda covering the full range of BU activities. Meetings will be held in private by default, but individual meetings can be made public at the request of a member to the BU secretary and with board approval. The board will continue to publish summary (non-confidential) minutes of meetings, and intends to communicate on a regular basis regarding specific issues. Again, in practice our members have not requested to attend previous BU Board meetings and so the previous system added complexity for little value.
The Trust is very conscious that it is critical our members understand what BU is delivering, and whether their elected representatives are truly acting in accordance with their public commitments. It is expected this new policy will allow BU Board members to achieve this without impacting on the appropriate confidentiality and collective responsibility you would expect of any commercial organisation.
The new policy can be found via the link provided below. If members have any questions regarding the revised policy they may contact their elected representatives or the Chair of BU, David Merritt, at david.merritt@beesunited.org.uk. To request a specific board meeting be held in public, or a general meeting with representatives of the BU Board, please contact the Secretary of BU, Chris Gammon, and chris.gammon@beesunited.org.uk.