BOOST FOR STORM PETRELS AND PHALAROPES THANKS TO RSPB'S SHETLANDS INITIATIVES

CHARITY RECEIVED MORE THAN £137.4-MILLION IN INCOME LAST YEAR - AND INVESTED £6.9-MILLION ON BUYING LAND AND IMPROVING VISITOR CENTRES

                                      

Storm petrels (Richard Crossley via Wikipedia)

THE countdown has begun to this year’s annual meeting of the RSPB which is due to be held at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster on October 7. Among the features will be a presentation on how much income the society (which has 1.19-million members) has received over the past 12 months and ways in which some of it has been spent. In his address to last year’s meeting, the honorary treasurer of the RSPB Council, Graeme Wallace, shone a light on the charity and its financial activities. Its total income was just over £137.4-million. Below are highlights from his wide-ranging speech.

Good morning everybody. It may not be a first, but it is unusual for the Treasurer to deliver the financial report with a musical introduction.

There is a good reason for that which I’ll come back to in a moment.

Regarding the financial performance of the RSPB in 2015-16, overall I am pleased to report that whilst we increased expenditure on vital work, we also ended the year with a headline surplus of £3.4 million.

We put this surplus, along with some of our financial reserves, to good use both acquiring new nature reserves and adding facilities to enhance our visitor experience.

Our financial reserves remain in reasonable shape to help us deal with whatever lies ahead.

This has been made possible thanks to the continuing trust and support of you, the members, to our dedicated and professional team of staff and volunteers, and to prudent financial management.

It is this that has allowed us to increase expenditure on conservation, while at the

same time charting a course for continued membership growth.

Before moving to the detail of the Treasurer’s report, I should like to reflect for just a moment on one example of what that increased conservation spend means for some of our key species.

Earlier this year, I was very fortunate to visit Shetland. This extraordinary place is probably the last bastion of breeding waders in the kind of numbers that I can remember from my youth: dunlin, curlew, redshank, lapwing, and snipe drumming overhead.

At dusk, the storm petrels return to their roost in the Moussa Broch, and churr happily to each other.

That sound is really something wonderful!

And it isn’t like this by chance.

The RSPB has been working hard to give nature a home here for years -

a project requiring scientific rigour and the building of trust with local landowners and crofters.

Needless to say, this doesn’t happen overnight.

While on the islands, I was lucky enough to see one of the flagship waders of Scotland: red-necked phalarope which breed in small numbers on the watery mires of Shetland. 

Red-necked phalarope (Andreas Trepte, www.photo-natur.net, via Wikipedia.

 We have been working on this species for quite a while, resulting in a fantastic growth in population.

Malcie Smith, the local warden, explained to me the extraordinary phalarope-tracking project they have undertaken.

The data showed, for the first time ever, that instead of flying to the Arabian Sea to overwinter, these tiny birds in fact flew all the way to the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Peru.

This epic return journey of 16,000 miles had never before been recorded for a European breeding bird . . . which brings me to the music.

This is part of a song cycle commissioned by the Head of Music at Haringey Music Service, following a cultural exchange between young musicians in the UK and Peru to explore connections between the two countries.

It is called One Small Bird: Ballad of the Red-necked Phalarope, and it was performed by more than 2,000 children at the Royal Albert Hall in London this year.

Trust, groundbreaking science, wonderful birds, and inspiring children about nature - this story seems to capture it all.

Turning now to the accounts, our net income (that is the money available for charitable purposes) was just over £100 million last year.

This was due largely to the continued generosity of our members and other supporters, including individuals and corporate bodies.

This level of income enabled us to increase our charitable expenditure again this year.

Our expenditure on charitable objects in the year reached £104.2-million.

This included £6.9-million on acquiring land and investing in visitor facilities which allowed us to expand several of our nature reserves, including Hesketh Out Marsh in Lancashire, where, instead of featureless fields, we will have a thriving tidal wetland full of wildlife.

We also made significant investment in the infrastructure on our reserves, including new facilities at Forsinard, and the visitor centres at Arne and Sandwell Valley.

The money we invest in our nature reserves covers a wide range of activities, from restoring and managing wildlife habitats to improving our visitor experience.

And in Nottinghamshire, we have a great new opportunity to engage with a huge number of visitors.

While we work hard to make sure our nature reserves are in ideal condition for wildlife, especially for our most vulnerable species, we also want to make sure our offices are in harmony with the natural environment.

And to help with this, we’ve installed a wind turbine at our HQ at the Lodge.

This turbine produces the energy equivalent of two thirds of the RSPB’s electricity needs - that’s the whole of the RSPB, including all of its reserves and regional offices.

This single turbine is making a big impact on our carbon footprint, as are the solar panels we’ve installed at seven of our reserves.

Managing our own nature reserves is a vitally important part of achieving our conservation objectives, but equally important is influencing the way that conservation takes place off our reserves.

We cannot, of course,  do all this alone; so working with partners and other like-minded organisations is crucial.

 During the year, we made £6.1 million available in grants to other organisations to support our conservation work, both in the UK and overseas.

This includes £1.4 million awarded to our BirdLife Partners throughout the world for projects such as our work to save rainforests in Sumatra and Gola in Sierra Leone.

Just like our partnership work in Shetland, rainforest conservation requires working closely with the local people and developing trust.

After years of being on the ground in Gola enduring a bloody civil war, then the ebola crisis, working with the local tribal communities we have reached agreement with them on how the forest might be managed sustainably.

This all needs financing, however, and following a technically challenging audit of the forest, it has been awarded the highest carbon credit rating.

We are now in a position to sell these credits to other organisations and individuals which, hopefully, will allow the development to pay for itself.

Let me turn now to Education and Communication. Saving nature means encouraging everyone to support nature conservation in whatever way they can whether that’s through individuals volunteering their time or giving a donation, or a politician making a decision that benefits nature, or a business working to reduce its carbon footprint.

We work hard at this because nature needs millions of people to make millions of decisions that favour it, long into the future.

It is especially important that we reach children, because, if the next generation does not feel connected with nature, it  will have no reason to save it

With all these things in mind, we increased our spending on Education and inspiring support by £1.9 million to £21.5 million.

Part of this was to continue improving our website and communications capabilities, which enable us to engage more effectively with people.

Another part of this spend was for the continuation of our Giving Nature a Home television advertising campaign.

This has been a very successful way for us to build a broader awareness of theRSPB, to reach new audiences and  further to increase the number of people supporting us.

The more people who rally alongside us to save nature, the more we are able to do.

This campaign has played an important role in increasing our membership over the last two years.

Before I move on to the RSPB’s income, I just wanted to say something about trust.

Public trust in charities was the subject of much media scrutiny during the year, and some fundraising practices received negative press coverage.

 The  RSPB organises its fundraising activities to the highest possible standards.

Our charity is built upon its reputation and relies upon the continuing support and trust of our members. We strive to go above and beyond the legalminimum requirements, and our fundraising team is committed to continuing to operate in this manner.

We are grateful to each and every one of you who have renewed your membership. The number of members who stay with us, year after year, is I think a good indicator of the trust you have in us.

And this year, our membership numbers reached an all-time high. Over the year, we recruited 100,000 new members, taking our total to 1.19-million.

The increase in members, along with support from other individuals and corporations, has helped increase our income for 2015/16 to reach just over £137.4- million.

This is before deducting the cost of generating funds, which includes the cost of goods for sale in our shops and membership recruitment costs.

Membership subscriptions and donations are our biggest income sources and the foundation of all we do, this year raising £47.7-million.

The  £20.8-million grant income stream appears, on the surface, to be a little disappointing compared with  last year. But many of our grant-funded projects span several years, and the year in which the income is recorded may cause fluctuations in the sum reported in the annual accounts.

With its £1.3-million upgrade, the superb new visitor centre at Bempton Cliffs forms a gateway and observation point for visitors to experience the UK’s largest seabird colony.

These cliffs are home to puffins, guillemots, razorbills and gannets, and with this new centre, you can fully appreciate the frenetic activity and the riotous sounds of the place.

Looking forward, we are of course concerned about the potential consequences of Brexit  on future grant prospects, and you can be sure that we will be doing all we can to protect them.

In the medium term we can draw some comfort from the fact that post-Brexit the Treasury has confirmed they will honour existing grant commitments.

Gifts of every size left in people’s wills are vital to the ongoing success of the RSPB, with legacies making up around 30 per cent of our net income. Legacy income for 2015-16 was £34-million - an increase of almost £3.5 million on the previous year.

This type of support is crucial to our success. It is financially important of course, but it also demonstrates people’s commitment to securing nature for future generations, and the faith that people have in the RSPB’s ability to achieve this on theirbehalf.

The bulk of our commercial trading income comes from our mail order catalogue, retail shops and cafes. Overall, trading income at £22.5m was up 3.3 per cent a pleasing result considering slower sales of bird food during the mild winter.

Pulling these income and expenditure threads together, you will appreciate that we are quite pleased to have been able to achieve much in spite of difficult prevailing conditions.

 Included in the expenditure are significant increases in investment in today’s conservation needs and in building support for the future.

And as we cast a wary eye to the immediate future, you will appreciate why we are thankful to have been able to maintain a reasonable level of financial reserves.

As at 31 March 2016, our free financial reserves stood at £12.5-million. This represents eight weeks’ worth of prospective annual expenditure, and is intended to allow us to plan our work programmes with confidence.

One of the questions that Council consider in their planning is how much should be spent on conservation work now and how much should be invested to ensure that current and future generations are knowledgeable about, and committed to, conservation.

 As mentioned earlier, we believe it is vital to invest in our children to increase their awareness of nature, the issues that it faces, and what can be done about it.

Today, less than 10per cent of children play regularly in natural places. We want to bring young people closer to wildlife, and so we are delighted that the supermarket Aldi has pledged to give the RSPB £2-million over three years to help increase children’s connections with nature.

The money has been raised via sales of carrier bags in England, Scotland and Wales.

It is an ambitious programme that will reach primary schools in 15 cities across the UK and family groups in public parks as well as four of our nature reserves where there will be a series of free nature sessions for schools.

Through our work with Aldi and beyond, we’re aiming for two million connections with nature over five years.

 So far the response has been terrific. Since rolling the scheme out in June 2015, we have given around 50,000 children an experience with nature through our work with Aldi alone.

With projects like this, we are helping make sure that future generations will value nature.