SVR General Discussion

Due to the continuing hot weather, S2 is now diesel until it cools down.

 

S2 back to steam tomorrow with 7714. 13268 remaining on S1.

 

Conversion to CCBS official as of yesterday, the SVR Holdings PLC is now Sever Valley Railway Society Limited.
https://svr.co.uk/news/historic-day...-valley-railway-society-is-formally-launched/

 

Use of the CCBS structure seems to be fairly popular among heritage lines, now. Several others are in the process of conversion, too. (I could confirm that the Bluebell is going that way, but ISTR there's at least one more.)

Noel

 

Fundraising appeal for the Kidderminster platform canopy launched by the SVRCT
https://www.svrtrust.org.uk/raisetheroof

 

The Bluebell is indeed going down that route. My understanding is that a CCBS is a comparatively recent legal entity; Railways that set their structure 10+ years ago didn't have it as an option.

It was explained at a recent-ish Bluebell meeting that they had looked at two main models to restructure with the overall objective of enabling fares to be considered charitable. One was the CCBS route; the other was to create an overall Charity with a trading subsidiary (which I think is broadly the NYMR structure, and also I think the IoWSR). Of those two models, the CCBS route was preferred, but there are complexities in implementation in two major areas: firstly, the importance of maintaining a continuity of which ever organisation in your "as is" structure that holds the operating licence (otherwise you have to go through a very expensive planning process for the new organisation to be allowed to operate trains); and secondly rules around how you convert from "as is" to " to be". For example, in our case, the Society is a company limited by guarantee; and the Plc is a company limited by shares, and there is no legal mechanism by which those two types of body can directly merge - hence the need for a series of interim changes via each body separately converting to a Community Benefit Society first, and then merging leading to the desired "to be" state of a CCBS.

The charitable part of a CCBS is interesting. As I understand it, such a body is not itself a charity, but is treated by HMRC as a charity for taxation purposes. That has the effect that the regulator for such bodies is the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Charity Commission - that explains the line in the press release put out by the SVR that says "[...] following approval of the conversion by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)." So AIUI, a CCBS is not a charity in the legal sense, but has all the taxation advantages of charitable status, and without some of the drawbacks.

The big governance advantage of the CCBS structure as I understand it is that the founding articles of the company can explicitly reference the delivery of heritage railway objectives as the explicit benefit that the company is providing to the community. That appears to me to provide a significant advantage over alternative structures in what has been one of the major flashpoints in recent discussions about heritage railway governance, which is the extent to which the company aims align with member aims. In the traditional Plc model, the company aims have to be about running a profitable commercial rail operator. In the charity model, you can - if you are not careful - get tied up in questions about delivering the charitable benefit to the public which are often not well aligned with member aspirations. The CCBS route seems to offer the the possibility of a much better alignment between member aspirations and company objectives.

Tom

 

Almost anything has got to be better than the mess the NYMR seems to have got itself into in terms of governence and direction. Be wary of how you use the supposed Gift Aid advantages on train fares.

 

But the mess is not about structure but people and values. And, on that, Bluebell seem to have managed to preserve the balance.

 

On the Gift Aid on fares point: how that works out is still to come. But my sense in the NYMR case is that it was not the Gift Aid per se that was the problem. It was that they initially chose the "free returns within one year model" and it is impossible in a heritage railway context to set a fare that is simultaneously low enough that it doesn't deter casual visitors, but high enough that it doesn't in effect create an incredibly under-priced year-long season ticket. It also (as became clear in the discussion on that thread) causes significant issues for any railway that wishes to hold numerous special events.

Then, by time the NYMR had switched to the "10% uplift" model, they then seemed to lose all notions of having any kind of coherent fares policy.

So I don't think it is the Gift Aid that is necessarily the problem, it is that in that case the implementation was severely botched. Hopefully the rest of us are "looking and learning" and not just swallowing without question the initial very positive PR about the railway "making £400k in Gift Aid" without any deeper critical analysis of how sustainable that was, or what it actually translated to in fare revenue and passenger numbers.

Tom

 

I think that’s fair, though the 10% uplift form has its own challenges (I’d probably not do it if I weren’t paying Higher Rate tax). As you say, one for very careful consideration.

 

But then if you book a few days in advance you get 10% off, which brings the gift aided fare (with 15% tea room voucher) below the cost of a non-gift aided fare bought on the day.

 

But not below the cost of a non gift aided fare also purchased in advance, and the value of the 15% voucher depends on whether and how you would use it.

All of which takes us back to the difficult question of what customers are willing to pay, and what they feel constitutes good value.