2024-01-31-accounts - Ditchling Village Hall

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DITCHLING VILLAGE HALL TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 JANUARY 2024

Reference and Administration Details

Name of charity: Ditchling Village Hall Principal address: 18 Lewes Road, Ditchling, Hassocks, West Sussex BN6 8TT

Charity Registration Number: 1175123

Trustees and Management Committee

The following individuals were Trustees of the Charity and members of the Management Committee from 1 February 2023 to the date of this report, unless otherwise stated:

Mrs V. Ingham (Chair) Mrs L. Hemsley (Treasurer) Mrs C Hinchliffe (appointed 8 January 2024) Mr J. Owen (appointed 8 January 2024) Ms G. Rice Mr P. Smith

Bankers : Lloyds Bank, 36-38 Church Road Burgess Hill, West Sussex RH15 9AH

Independent Examiner : S. Cole, 33 Shirleys, Ditchling, West Sussex BN6 8UD

Structure, Governance and Management

Ditchling Village Hall (“the Charity or “the DVH”) is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, governed by a constitution document dated 26 September 2017, although in previous legal forms the Charity dates from 23 July 1920. It is run by a Management Committee, comprising the Trustees and other individuals, who meet as and when required.

The Charity must have at least three Trustees. There is no maximum number of Trustees but the number of Trustees is considered and kept under review from time to time. The recruitment of new Trustees is targeted at those local to the Charity and with appropriate skills to assist in its management.

The elected Trustees must be elected at an annual general meeting at which all inhabitants of the area of benefit of 18 years and upward are entitled to attend and vote. The Trustees shall maintain a list of user bodies that they consider to be supportive of the CIO’s objects and which have indicated a wish to appoint a Trustee of the CIO. Each listed user body shall have the right to appoint one Trustee. Any such appointment must be made according to the ordinary practice of the appointing body and must be notified in writing to the secretary. Coopted Trustees must be appointed at a duly constituted meeting of the elected Trustees.

Objectives and Activities

The objectives of the Charity are to establish and run a village hall and to promote for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Parish of Ditchling and the neighbourhood (the “area of

benefit”) without distinction of sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, race or political, religious or other opinions the provision of facilities for recreation or other leisure time occupation of individuals who have need of such facilities by reason of their youth, age, infirmity or disablement, financial hardship or social and economic circumstances or for the public at large in the interests of social welfare and with the object of improving the conditions of life of the said inhabitants.

The Charity achieves its objectives through the hiring of the hall to a broad and diverse range of individuals and groups.

The Trustees consider that they have complied with the duty in the Charities Act 2011 to have due regard to public benefit guidance issued by the Charity Commission.

Chair’s Report on Achievements and Performance

We are very lucky within Ditchling to have this amazing hall facility to be used by our residents. And the driving ambition for the team looking after Ditchling village hall is try to look after and ensure we maintain this great place to as high a standard as possible whilst ensuring hiring it is as affordable as possible for all groups.

1. Hirers

The good news is that hires in 2024 are up and so our anticipating income for 2024 will also go up. Year to date after month 7 we have an income of around £25,000. If we compare this to our annual incomes for 2022 and 2023, these were similar at around £32,000 and £33,000 respectively, things are looking healthier in 2024. This predicted higher 2024 income is due to increased hires volume but also the small increases we have made to hirer fees over the last few years. By comparison in 2021 our total income was £21,000 when recovering from COVID. This is set against the baseline in 2019 pre COVID of £43,000. However, with the increased cost of living our outgoings have increased to keep the hall running, both the general running costs which include utility bills and secondly the maintenance and repair work required. In 2023 of the £33,000 income we spent almost exactly the same sum. Currently we have healthy reserves, because of the Covid-19 grants we received. However, we have a number of big projects on the horizon that may significantly impact on these. More about this later.

If we look specifically at who is hiring the hall: 60% were resident and 40% non-resident in 2023. Resident hire fell as low as 35% in 2021 and has slowly been increasing since. By comparison in 2019 68% of hires were residents.

2. Trustees and Committee

The village hall could not function without its dedicated volunteers to whom the village is indebted. The same group of people have continued this last year and plan to do so for the next year, which is a testament to their commitment to this hall in trying to ensure it remains this great community asset for all to use. Lorna Hemsley has continued as our treasurer over the last year. Lorna ensures that we are financially very careful and works very hard to ensure we have the best possible deals. However, or more importantly, she is exceptionally diligent to ensure our hirers have fair and very competitive rates She has spent a lot of time reviewing hire charges again this year, in other facilities like our hall across our area. She also contributes considerably to the safe and efficient running of the hall, way beyond the treasurer role and we are incredibly lucky she continues to contribute her time to do this. Phil Smith also continues in the vice-chair role. Phil is our memory bank as he has been part of the hall’s management team for many years now, so has lots of very helpful information about how it has run and has very sound and sensible advice for us. His experience is very important to the hall’s ongoing success. Catherine Hinchliffe has been our in our bookings secretary for a

number of years now and also became a trustee of the hall at our last AGM. In simple terms, without Catherine this hall would not run. She manages both to keep the bookings running efficiently without clashes/mishaps and at the same time manages to ensure that as many hirers can be accommodated as possible at their chosen time. She ensures hirers’ experience of the hall is a good and is exceptionally helpful to them. She does this though being very organised but more importantly uses her boundless enthusiasm to ensure everyone is happy. Gemma Rice had been involved with the hall for number of years, more latterly as a trustee. She continues to know more about the Hallmaster booking system than anybody else and tries to get the most out of it to help Catherine in the booking’s role. She also manages the website and publicity on social media, as well as being someone with lots of common sense and is always willing to help. Jonathan Owen joined us as a trustee last year, having moved back to the village after many years. He ensures the routine maintenance schedule is up to date and completed and has taken over managing the insurance and charity returns. He is very practical and has great common sense, with experience in managing properties, so his skills have been really valuable to ensuring the hall continues in a great shape.

Stephen Cole has been our independent examiner for the first time this last year, reviewing the accounts of 2023/24. He was our previous treasurer, and so has a lot of experience with the hall. We know he is incredibly diligent and detailed in his approach, as is Lorna, and so we are very grateful to Stephen for agreeing to continue to do this work for us.

Roy and Diane Burman continue as our premises supervisors.

3. Self-employed contractors

It is also necessary for us to utilise, on a self-employed basis, people to look after the day-today running of the hall. Ben Inman joined us in March 2024 after we were without a caretaker for some months. Ben manages the day-to-day maintenance and safety of the hall and coordinates with our contractors to arrange and support maintenance and repair work when we need to get outside help. He is the day-to-day person people will see and is crucial in the hall’s smooth running. Hayley Mathias has now been our cleaner since July 2023, she does a brilliant job adapting her working pattern around our hires to keep the hall very clean and tidy, she also is great at finding and alerting us to snags and problems in the hall which she finds, making sure that she does all she can to protect the safety of hall users when she finds something, until it can be fixed. Liz Pope is also contracted to do our external gardening, and we have received lots of positive comments about the front flower borders and hanging baskets this summer.

4. Who are our hirers

Our hirers continue to be the same mix of private enterprises that run activities mainly but not exclusively for local residents. Garet Newell who runs Feldenkrais continues to be a big supporter of the hall, using our facilities to hold her courses. Then we have an ever increasing number of exercise classes including Russell Wood, Sophie Mills and Brian Ingram (so there is no excuse not to keep fit in Ditchling if you are about in the daytime) and Ashley Knowles is continuing to run his music events. We also have the local organisations and pay great thanks for their ongoing support. These include the Horticultural Society, Wine Society, DVA with their monthly coffee mornings and new comer events, the Players, Film society, Ditchling Museum and the toddlers group to name but a few. We also have the Attic art group who hire twice a year during the Art Wave events. Then locals continue to hire the hall for events such as parties, wakes and other events. We believe Ditchling community is really lucky to have this great facility of the village hall as a venue for all our local community to use and a major reason for supporting the hall. The Parish council continue with their support renting out the office as well as using the hall for their meetings.

We constantly continue to encourage and develop new hirers and maintain the ones we already have.

5. Refurbishments and expenditures

We are continually trying to ensure that the hall remains both safe and well maintained. It is an old building and there are multiple internal and external repairs to keep up with. One of the things we have spent money this year on has been commissioning an external report about the energy efficiency or otherwise of the hall and what we might do to improve this, including energy saving and green initiatives for both the short and long term. We commissioned this from Nick Owens, who is involved in HKD transition. The first thing advised for us to do, was improve the insulation and managed to secure a very generous grant from HKD transition to support this. Other more expensive and complex initiatives would require significant structural building redesign and so knowing what could be possible is really important such that as we continue to maintain the building, we can try to incorporate these suggestions as we go. We’ve been painting the hall and still have some way to go. We have been working on the damp that has developed in the parish council office and fixing the root cause. Along with investing in a ventilation system for the room. We have needed work on the roof and had some new windows. Another part of the hall that has really needed attention for some time was the external wooden cladding that predominantly surrounds the main hall area and foyer. This had been in a state of poor repair for some time and we looked and were quoted on the options to either replace the existing wooden boards with new ones or with another material. The cost of these necessary repairs was estimated at many thousands of pounds. We were keen to ensure we kept this external area sympathetic to the current look of the building and the surrounding village. We were then very fortunate to meet a local resident James Bowtell who lives down Lewes Road and is a local developer. He grew up in the village, his family lives here and feels very invested in supporting our local community. He extremely kindly agreed to repair/replace and refurbish the existing cladding / window surrounds and that was why the building was half surrounded by scaffolding for many months. His team was hit by bad weather but the work was completed in the early summer. We are forever indebted to him as the external building is now watertight, better insulated and looks so much better.

Day to day running expenses have gone up as has the cost of living for everyone. Lorna Hemsley continues to be very diligent in ensuring the best possible utility deals for us, as this is one of our large areas of expense besides maintenance. She had secured some long-term utility contracts with very favourable price caps despite the whole market having exponential fuel cost increases. However, the gas contract changed in July 2024 and the electricity one will do in April 2025, but still remain very competitive in this new climate due to Lorna’s work on this.

6. Donations

We have been very generously supported by the Ditchling Parish Council this year to contribute to the purchase of a new village sign for the front of the hall. This has been slow in the deployment, as due to the size we cannot simply buy a sign and need planning permission, but this is being explored. The Ditchling Parish Council also continues to allow public access free Wi-Fi within the hall building for the benefit of our users. And as already mentioned, we have more than generously been supported by HKD Transition with the insulation installation in the cavity walls and the repair and renovation of the external building cladding by James Bowtell. The Ditchling Village Society have also bought and installed for display the five pictures you can see in the main hall area upstairs, with some money that was left to them by villager Gerry Hinckley. These are a selection of photos submitted to Shirley Crowther’s Ditchling Society photographic competition of a few years ago. We all spent some time working out how this would work best and they look great. There is a great one of the high street by Tom Dufty who sadly died this last year and who contributed a great deal to this village hall and Ditchling Parish as a whole, so it’s very fitting that one of his pictures is displayed.

7. Incidents and complaints

In terms of misadventure, we've had no insurance claims and no accidents in our accident book this last year. We've had a number of small complaints but no significant issues, all of which have been remedied to the satisfaction of the hirer and the village hall team.

8. In closing

We've had a good year all in all: hires remain healthy and the hall is in a good state of repair. By reaching out to external sources of funding we have successfully managed to maintain the hall whilst keeping the hirer costs competitive. And we now have got some forwards planning for initiatives we can adopt in the future to help energy usage in the hall and promote our greener agenda.

We wouldn’t have a hall without our hirers, so the most important thanks go to all of them for their continuing support in choosing to use the hall, and it seems that they continue to really enjoy the facilities we have here.

Financial Review and Policies on Reserves

As in previous years, the accounts of the Charity have been drawn up on a cash basis. For the year ended 31 January 2024, the Charity had a deficit of payments over receipts of £422 (2023: £8,955 surplus), comprising receipts of £33,169 (2023: £32,026) and payments of £33,591 (2023: £23,071). Receipts comprise hire income of £30,793 (2023: £30,288), donations and legacies of nil (2023: £1,212), restricted grant income of £250 (2023: nil) and investment income of £2,126 (2023: £526).

After taking into account net deposits received from and repaid to hirers, the Charity’s cash funds decreased in value by £647 (2023: £9,505 increase) during the year, resulting in cash funds held at 31 January 2024 of £60,312 (2023: £60,959).

After taking into account hire income debtors and deposits held at the end of the year which are repayable to hirers, the Charity had net reserves carried forward of £58,037 compared to £58,459 at the start of the year.

Of the Charity’s reserves, £250 is restricted and the balance of £57,787 is unrestricted. The Trustees consider unrestricted reserves of £57,787 to be appropriate to meet short term requirements for the management of the Charity, being more than sufficient to meet ongoing expenses for more than six months in the event of there being no income for this period.

On behalf of the Trustees

Mrs V Ingham – Trustee/Chair Date: 25 September 2024

DITCHLING VILLAGE HALL (Charity number 1175123) st Accounts for the year ended 31 January 2024

DITCHLING VtLLAGE HALL Aeeoufjts for the year ended 315t January 2024 Independent Examiner's Report to the Trustees of Ditchling Village Hall I rewrt to the trustees on my exaMInoll of the accounts of Ditchling Village H811 for the year ended 31" January 2024. Responsibilitie5 and basis of report As the chaTity trustees of the Trusl you are rwLsible for the preparation of the accounts in accordance with the requirements of the Chariti¢s Act 2011 ('the Act.). J report in respect of my examination of the Tntst's accounts carried out under section 145 of th¢ Act and in carrying out my examit)ation I have followed all the applicable Directions given by the Charity Commission under section 145(5)(b) of the Act. Independent examiner's ststeJDent I have completed my examination. I confinn that no material rnattets have come to my attention in conneclion with the examiDation giving me cause to believe that in any materia] respect: . accounting records were not kept in raspect of the TnLgt &$ required by section 130 of the 2. the accounts do not acrd with those tecords I have no concerns and have come across no other matters in connection with the examination to which attention should be drawn in this report in order to enable a proper understanding of the accounts to b¢ Th¢d. S. Col¢ F 33 Shirleys. Dilchling. West Sussex BN6 8UD Date: Z4" loLt

Accounts for Ibe year ended 315t January 2024 Statement of Assets Ydnd Liabilities 31 January 2024 31" January 2023 Ullrestricted Total Funds Unrestritfed R&¥trirted Funds Funds Total Funds CASH FUNDS Bank balance- current accowit Bank balance- exFense account Bank balance- savings account COIF Charities deposit fund Total C&8h Fullds 1207 170 10.834 47.851 250 1,457 170 10.834 14,881 319 OTHER MONETARY ASSETS Hit? incom¢ delAors NON-MONETARY ASSETS LAnd and buildin85 used by the Charity Freehold property known as Ditchlin8 Village Hall (hher assels Contents of the Hall: sta84 Piano, tablffj chair4 kitchen fxttings and equipment Note: The buildlng and cont¢nts are insured for £2,499J26 and £57,471, ffsp¢¢tiv¢ly LIABILlEs Key depositsldeposits received for future events 2275 2,500 NOTES TO THE ACCOUNTS: Related party transActions: The Receipts and Payments Account includes amounts receiveA from Ditchling Parish Council. of which the Chair of Trustee& Dr V. Ingham, is a member. as follows.. Grants- £250 (2023.. nil) Hire income- rent of otTice of £854 (2023: £854} Repairs. mainfrnance & ¢quipment- reimbursement of costs of £1.080 (2023.. nil) Lightin& h¢atin& water & waste colle¢tion- reimbursement of electricity cgeS of £48 (2023.. nil) The trusteeg receive no remuneration and no eX[se$ w¢re paid to any truste during the Y (2023.. nil) Donated ets: 2024: none (2023: a new refriguator costing £788 given to the Charity) L. A. Hemsley, Treasurer For and on bel]aif of the Management Con]n)ittee

DrrcHLtNG VILLAGE HALL Aeeounts for the year ended 31st January 2024 Reeeipts and Payments Account 2024 2023 Total Funds Unrestricted Unrutrirtd Restricted Funds Totsl FuDds RECEIPTS Donations. legacies & graiits Donations Grnnts 1.212 250 250 250 250 1,212 Trading acttvities Hire income: Village 18,404 12J89 18,404 12.389 13,865 16.423 Investment income Interest on COIF Charities Deposit Fund Intsrest on Lloyds savings account 526 34 34 526 TOTAL RECEIPTS EXCLUDING I)FPO.SITS 250 33.169 32,026 PAYMENTS Repairs. maintenance & equipment Lighting, heating, water & waste ColltIOn Caretaker and cleanin8 Licences Insurance Advertising & marketing Other expenscs, including postage & stationery TOTAL PAYMENTS EXCLUDING DFPOSITS 18,520 5,705 6.188 550 2248 18.520 5,705 6.188 550 9,078 3,566 7.016 749 2.180 58 424 2248 380 380 3391 33591 23.071 SURPLUS (DEFICIT) OF RECEIIryS OVER PAYMENTS (672) 250 (422) 8,955 Net depisits received froml(repaid to) hirers NET MOVEMENT IN CASH FUNDS 225 225 550 250 (647) 9,$05 CASH FUIWS Brought forward at start of year 60.959 60,959 51,454 caled fonyard at end of year 6ffj062 250 60J12 60,959 This account has been prepared on a re£e13 and payments b&sis

DITCHLING VILLAGE HALL (Charity number 1175123) st Accounts for the year ended 31 January 2024