Video transcription

Hello, I’m Jono Bruun, the CEO of the College. 

Today I’d like to update you on the work that our Executive Team, Council, and Board of Trustees have been doing regarding the College’s Estate. Chiefly this concerns our home, Churchill House, and its fitness for purpose in serving our members, supporting our team, and contributing to the delivery of our charitable objectives. 

Just over a year ago in the Bulletin I wrote about the financial challenges the College was facing at the time, and what we would be doing to try and make our assets work better for you. I said then that our trustees would be looking at the use of Churchill House and the best way to build a College estate that was fit for the future, for its members and the specialty. 

Our first step was to look at how we could use Churchill House a little better.  

As many of you know, we have over the years delivered the bulk of our member-facing activities from the College building. Examinations, workshops and events, Council and committee meetings have all been held at Churchill House, and it has served those functions really well.  

Like most other organisations, Covid revolutionised our working patterns, our service needs and our building requirements, changing them forever. With the advent of hybrid working and online meetings, exams and events, the amount of space we needed reduced substantially. Recent analysis concluded that we had roughly twice the amount of space that we needed. So, we’ve made some changes. These have included introducing hot desking for the staff team and using much less floor space throughout the building.  

This will have helped to advance our sustainability goals by reducing our carbon footprint, and it has also allowed us to bring in tenants to occupy unused space, which has contributed to the financial health of the College. But that isn’t really enough. 

The College building needs a significant amount of investment to help it meet new regulations around sustainability and accessibility, and to bring it into line with other, more modern places of work.  

Delivering a programme of modernisation, to bring us up to code, would be very expensive to deliver, and could ultimately be unaffordable for the College.  

Over the last year we have been working with Gerald Eve property consultants, who have done a full review of the building. We have worked with architects, structural surveyors, planning consultants, rights of light consultants, and many others - all the experts in the field - to help us make a stay or go decision. 

This is not a decision I make as CEO. As a charity, any decision to dispose of property is the responsibility of the Board of Trustees, and this is set out in our Charter. Our trustees have to manage the resources of the College responsibly. Empty space in a charity’s building is a waste, so there is quite an urgency to address that squandered resource. 

Taking all these factors into account, I recommended to the Board of Trustees in July of this year that we should seek to sell Churchill House and find a new home for our members. Our trustees have approved this recommendation and agreed a marketing plan for the building which was provided for us by Gerald Eve LLP.  

The College is now on a pathway that will probably lead to us leaving the building that has been our home for the last twenty years or so and creating a new home for our membership, our visitors and our staff.  

None of this will happen immediately, but I wanted to tell you about it at the earliest opportunity because I hope you will be pleased that we are seeking to manage the College’s resources responsibly. 

We want to hear your opinions on what our next home needs. We want it to be somewhere you feel at home and can use more frequently.  

It may be quite different to Churchill House, for instance we are considering holding exams in other venues, possibly in regional centres.   

We intend to put our values first by building sustainability, accessibility, responsibility, innovation and care into the foundations of our new College estate. And affordability is critical too: one of our key objectives is that the move will be delivered without taking on extra borrowing, we are very keen to live within our means. 

We will be sharing more information about this decision and how we expect to consult with our members regarding our next home soon. I will be very interested to hear your views.  

Thank you.