Zebedee
Well-Known Member
For me the one big, HUGE red flag - is that they want to increase the number of people that can call for an EGM from 12 to 250+. 12 is an easily achieveable number. How many folk know 249 other members? The only reasonable reason I can see for this would be if this had been getting abused by the membership calling multiple EGMs annually and thus wasting money. I haven't seen any signs of this.
So why do they want to make calling an EGM so much more difficult? It doesn't signal to me an operation that is wanting to be open and accessible to their members.
I think it would be very easy to read a bit too much in to this. I think most people are aware that a group of BE members (about 112 I think?) recently called for an EGM. That meeting cost BE around about £8k. I think that raised alarm bells somewhere in the BHS that if only 12 people were needed to call an EGM there was a huge potential for 'malicious' meeting calling, so they'ev come up with a very small percentage of members needed to call such a meeting. There is still some lack of clarity as to what form the document would need to take -but it has been confirmed that it wouldn't need to be one single document - it could be single requests sent in together. Could it be circulated by scanning a document, printing it, signing it, then scanning it forward to the next person? Even if scans weren't acceptable -and that would be surprising as scanned documents sent by email are considered acceptable for many other purposes - if everybody who supported the call for a meeting put their signed declaration in the post on the same day and sent it first class to a collator who then forwarded it I think a call for a meeting could still each the BHS within 72 hrs. With social media groups etc it isn't even that hard to contact 200 + people, and there still the good old telephone to spread the word as well.
So in short while I can see that it does look like a huge leap in numbers I personally don't see anything sinister about it. I would hope though that some middle ground re the numbers needed could be found, and that peoples concerns about this aspect at least could be put to rest.