MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Resource distribution systems
exceeded your budgets." Quite rightly so. They are in the middle
of a huge maelstrom. So you have to have that sort of flexibility.
There is one way of doing it. You can either have £10 1/2m
which is Ed's budget -- so I control everything -- or you break it
up. So we have broken it up. I had to get to a position, and it is
not yet in our objectives but in a year or so's time when we are a
little more settled, to go back to a sort of star chamber,
exchequer sort of discretion on what the budgets should be
where people would make a proposal about their budgets. We
used to have this system in old BIFU except that some people
would do it particularly well and some people would do it on the
back of a fag packet and that really used to brass me off. I was
in charge of much smaller units and I would have it down to the
last penny. Some of the bigger units just said "we’ll have
£35,000,” just like that. I happened to think it was stupid. That is
a process we want to go back to, I think. We are setting budgets
for them but there is not at this moment in time much throughput
as to what they need. We are in the middle of a learning
process. RBS/NatWest is our biggest combination with 40,000
or so members. It is huge. But their budget is not based on
subscriptions from 40,000 members. What I have made quite
clear is that if we go to a budgeting exercise there is no question
of people saying that they are the biggest and they get the most.
That is my only reservation about introducing it now. I have
decided to wait. We did think about doing it but we decided to
wait. Especially since we have Barclays and NatWest as two
huge dominant forces in this new union and we have not moved
the offices around. So the barons are going to say, hold on a
minute, it's just like three unions joined together. So we are
keeping the finances central. And I would like to get to it within a
year. That is an objective I have set myself. People are not
feeding into their budgets so there is no ownership at the
moment.
In the absence of ownership, it is not surprising that concern about the
system was voiced:-
My only involvement was the submission of a budget for training
for my section and I was awarded anything I asked for, mostly
on the basis that I had actually taken the trouble to submit the
thing and try and explain what I wanted. So from my limited
experience it doesn’t appear to work very well. I’m not saying
that I researched it terribly well but I did actually do some sums
and thought that this would probably cover what I was actually
planning to do whereas others either forgot to put it in in time, or
whatever and so had figures knocked down. And they may well
have researched more than me or asked for more, I don’t know
so it isn’t terribly scientific from what I can see. For my particular
section, which is building societies, I had opportunity to input into
what their budget for the year would be other than that
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