Mr. Noel O'Connor:

We started a project three years ago this month to identify our requirements around charities legislation and how it will affect us. It identified a number of issues for us which is resulting in a proposal for a national and local restructuring. That means our groups will now have to register as individual entities, i.e. as individual charities. Obviously, that entails big challenges for us. We have already registered our groups in Northern Ireland with the Charity Commission there, so that process is finished. However, to get that done, we had to have people in place to assist groups. We had to develop resources and provide training and we had extra insurance requirements because we were asking people not only to be volunteers locally anymore but to take on legal responsibilities as trustees of their groups. Until now, a scout group council could have a membership of 20 or 30 people sharing the responsibility of running it. The proposed restructure to help us with compliance in this area will shrink the group down to five or seven people who will be the identifiable trustees and responsible for all the actions of the scout group. That clearly imposes big challenges in terms of how we maintain democracy within the group to provide all our volunteers and young people with a say in how it is run. That requires a new way of thinking and a great deal of work is having to go into that. Our national council in three weeks time will debate these challenges, cast some votes and decide how to make progress in this area.

From a Scouting Ireland point of view, this has been a three-year project and it has been resource heavy. That means we have had to use our volunteer resources, including expert volunteers in this area. We have also had to use professional resources meaning people who are knowledgeable and qualified in the area on our professional team. We also had to pay for some support on this also with financial and legal advice. Every time we have to allocate resources to something like this, it takes away resources from something else. Typically, it is the front-line stuff that suffers straight away. We are pulling people off our front-line support to allocate some of their time to help us with this project. The project is obviously a major and worthwhile one. We want to be compliant and to demonstrate accountability, transparency and probity but that does not come without a cost. It seems to us that this added cost is an unintended consequence of the legislation. Other groups and organisations are having to face this now. We see it within our own NYCI network. It is a sectoral issue rather than just a Scouting Ireland issue. Any organisation dealing with young people, working with local communities, handling money and going through vetting is facing these challenges.

As we pull resources from our front-line support, it means we are not getting to our scout groups as often as we would like. We are failing to provide the level of support to groups that we would like and we are not developing as many groups or sections as we would like. To be blunt, we need more resources allocated to us to allow us to do both. We want to do both. We want to be compliant and we want to develop and provide people with more opportunities. Ultimately, it is the case that there is only so much money in the account and so many hours in the week. Extra resources are needed for us to do everything we want to do.