Hello lovely students and members of our community.
This blog post is going to be a little different than what you’re used to at this point. Rather than spend my lines talking about what I’ve been up to (which I will return to on my next post), I want to dedicate this post to explaining SU finances to you. When I ran for this role last year, one of my manifesto points was about transparency of SU finances- admittedly, so far, I’ve done nothing to pursue this but I am changing that right now! Here is the rundown of how the SU gets money, and how we spend it.
By law, SUs across the country – including ours – are registered charities that are completely independent to the university. As charities do, we have a board of trustees that makes the high level and strategy decisions of the organisation, with the chair of it being yours truly. This is why we call the SU a student-led organisation.
This organisation has three main sources of funding. The biggest source of funding is a block grant given by the university, which this academic year amounts to £2,143,000.00. The second biggest source of income is through our commercial offer: bars, nightclub events, Starbucks, and one-off events. Worth mentioning that we make a very small profit on these activities because we want to keep them as affordable as possible, but we do need to make some money to be able to finance such events/services. Finally, other activities such as hiring out the space on the second floor of the 1E SU building, sponsorships and partnerships, and commission. The total turnover for the SU amounts to around £4m.
You might at this point have the same question that I had the first time I heard about the block grant. If we’re independent from the university and we’re meant to be representing students around their issues, even if against the university, isn’t this problematic?
My initial thought was that it was. However, by law, universities must give Sus money – though not specifying how much. Secondly, I’ve increasingly realised that it’s in the university’s best interest to have us as a (and here comes any SU’s favourite term) ‘critical friend’. We will again and again see how they encourage us to challenge how things are running, and the culture that we have at Bath allows us to do it freely. From time to time, you’ll even get a nudge from inside the university to challenge something from a perspective that no one could do internally. So, the answer is yes, it could be problematic, but up to date is hasn’t been. That, and unfortunately without the block grant we don’t have the capacity to promote the level of services we have now.
In the context of a cost of living crisis as well as the period of recovery from COVID (which took a chunk out of our reserves to keep activities going), and the changing demographic of our student community (you must have seen how people are drinking and going out less), we’ve been exploring how to change our offer to something that not only continues to give us financial income so we can run activities and services for you, but also so it answers to what students want. I would be very grateful of any input you can give me on this.
The other question I can imagine you asking is, what happens to our society and clubs' membership fees? Well, despite some rumours and misunderstandings, none of it goes to the SU’s central budget. The fees you pay completely go back to the student groups. In the case of the general society membership (£3 per year per student), that money goes to the societies central fund to which all societies can apply to for one-off events. Sports memberships are used to fund the budget of each club, and additional costs such as BUCS fees go to competitive teams’ budgets and fees.
One little parenthesis there is what happens with your SCORE tickets. When you use your club’s code when purchasing, your club gets what we call kickback. So, for every ticket a member of your sport purchases, £1 goes to your club’s budget. Talk about good value for money!
As SU president, I oversee everything finance from the officers’ side, so I can assure you this is an accurate account of the Union’s finances. That said, I’m more than happy to go through any questions or concerns you might have. You know where to find me!
Hope to see you or hear from you soon. In the meantime, stay warm and be kind to one another!
Much love,
Jiji x