Our resolutions at the next annual meeting can restore the trust to its core purpose, but only if we have the votes

Zewditu Gebreyohanes | The Telegraph | 19 August 2022 (print edition Saturday 20 August 2022)

The National Trust is one of our cornerstone national institutions. For over a century it faithfully preserved our nation’s built and natural heritage. Yet, over the past few years, the charity has been straying from its founding aims and ethos. It has become increasingly commercialised and bureaucratised, creating a gulf between the management and everyone below: the volunteers, members, tenants, locals, farmers and donors.

Perhaps the most shocking case study of the trust’s dereliction of duty is that of Clandon Park House – the fine 18th-century Palladian mansion with a magnificent Baroque interior, which was ravaged by fire in 2015. The National Trust management has now decided that it will not restore Clandon as promised, as it claims to be keen to preserve “the evocative spaces created by the fire”. This is despite the fact that it has seen fit to take the £63 million insurance payout; how the trust’s founders would turn in their graves.

Elsewhere, we see forays into controversial social activism irrelevant to the trust’s charitable objectives, the dismissive and patronising attitude towards volunteers – without whom the trust could not exist – including through the imposition of compulsory “everyday inclusion” training, and the partial or full closure of a number of sites bequeathed to the trust on the understanding that they would be accessible to the public for posterity.

Why, then, do we at Restore Trust call on our supporters to rejoin the National Trust in spite of all this? It is because the upcoming AGM, to be held in Bath on November 5, provides members with an opportunity to make their voices heard and to return the institution to the straight and narrow. We need supporters to vote for Restore Trust’s members’ resolutions and for council candidates who will scrutinise the work of the trustees and hold them to account.

The first of our two resolutions this year is to abolish the chairman’s discretionary proxy vote. Members who do not attend the AGM in person appoint the chairman as their proxy to vote on the members’ resolutions. If they do not specify whether their vote on any given resolution is to be cast as “For”, “Against” or “Abstain”, they automatically give their vote to the chairman to use as he wishes. This gives the chairman a huge block of votes to cast, skewing the results and meaning that many resolutions which would otherwise have passed do not.

Our second resolution calls for the establishment of an independent ombudsman which would ensure that the National Trust remains accountable to its supporters, who at present have no recourse to a complaints procedure independent of the trust’s management. The Charity Commission can investigate wider problems, but not individual cases.

Every year in the run-up to the AGM the trust management releases a list of its recommended candidates, who unsurprisingly tend to rubber stamp rather than scrutinise decisions. Restore Trust will be recommending an alternative list of council candidates who will be effective at holding the trustees to account.

Sadly, many of those sympathetic to our cause have told us that they have already left the trust. While that is understandable, one should be mindful of the fact that the management might not regret seeing some of the more opinionated members leaving. The only way we can effect change at the top, after all, is by remaining members and voting en masse for the Restore Trust resolutions and council candidates.

If you are saddened to see the National Trust going, like so many institutions, down the wrong path, please make sure you renew your membership by August 26 to secure your vote at the upcoming AGM. 

Zewditu Gebreyohanes is director of Restore Trust.