OpenCharities

This text was generated using OCR and may contain errors. Check the original PDF to see the document submitted to the regulator.

2025-03-31-accounts

Trustees’ Annual Report and Accounts

For the Year Ended 31st March 2025

Woking Environment Action Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO)

Registered Charity Number 1206164

Contents

Contents
Introduction 2
Our WEAct Plan 3
Report of the Trustees 4
Our Remit and Public Benefit 4
Membership, Our Volunteers and Group Leaders 5
Legal, Administrative and Organisational Detail 6
Our Governing Body – The WEAct Trustee Board 6
Accounts and Restated December 2023 to March 2025 Accounts 11/12
WEAct Project Reports 14

1

Introduction

This is our first formal full year report for our group operating as a Charity and covers our activities and our financial reporting from 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025. By publishing this report, we hope to inform our members, potential new volunteers/members, Woking residents and our neighbours about our projects and organisation. Plus, by producing the report we hope that we will demonstrate that we are operating and complying with our English/Welsh Charity registration as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO).

This year, 2024 to 2025, was a significant period for our Charity WEAct, with a new development plan, new activities and successes. Highlights have included continued success at our Repair Cafe, including a creative project by the Repair Cafe textile team in designing and making a new group banner to use at events and with campaigning. For our WEAct on Nature / Biodiversity team, we have initiated Water Quality testing on six sites in Woking, and we have also arranged a significant tree planting within the Borough on parks and commons. Please read on for more details and for our ongoing environmental concerns.

WEAct commissioned and purchased two Ecology Reports by Surrey Wildlife Trust during 2024, for Millmoor Common and St. John’s Lye. These reports, now available on our website, will provide the basis for management plans, focusing our voluntary work on these green spaces.

Our annual report is drawn from and developed from the information that we provided to our members at our Annual General Meeting, which was held in Woking in the WWF Centre on 25th June 2025.

Our activities are based on volunteer time and enthusiasm for the various topics that we cover and this changes over time based on volunteer engagement. A couple of our groups were less active during this year than in previous years, including our Climate Action Group and our WEAct on Plastic group. At the time of writing this report (October 2025) we have renewed interest in our Climate Action Group based on the coming reorganisation of local government in Surrey with new volunteers getting involved.

If our report raises questions or sparks your interest in being part of our charity, please get in contact with us. Our email is hello@wokingenvironmentaction.org

Ellen Pirie and Rupert Devereux – Trustees and Co-Chair. October 2025.

2

Our WEAct Plan

In January 2025, we published a new organisational plan which set out our priorities for the next 18 months. They were:

  1. To ensure our communications increase awareness of WEAct within Woking and support delivery of our objectives.

  2. To provide (new and existing) opportunities to inspire local people to take action to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies.

  3. To increase numbers of local people engaging with WEAct as active volunteers and members to ensure that we are a robust, sustainable organisation.

  4. To drive positive action on the ecological emergency locally and continue to lead on projects that protect and improve our local environment.

  5. To drive positive action on climate change locally, targeting local government and businesses.

  6. To run WEAct effectively as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) with proper governance, reporting and policies.

We will refresh our plan in April 2026 and every 12 months thereafter.

3

Report of the Trustees

Our Remit and Public Benefit

It is important that the activities and developments that we undertake are defined, guided by our objectives and purpose. With our new charity status, we will, as a group of Trustees and members, be regularly reviewing and checking that we are following our constitution adopted objectives. For clarity, our objectives are:

To promote the conservation, protection and improvement of our physical and natural environment, in particular in Woking and the surrounding areas:

on various environmental topics including biodiversity loss, climate change, sustainable living, and the climate and ecological emergency.

Prior to July 2023, when we were not a registered charity, our constitution objective was more focussed on sustainability, and read: ‘to promote sustainability in the Borough of Woking by creating partnerships, disseminating information and managing projects to support Woking Residents and businesses, in living and working more sustainably’.

We have a number of projects that have run in 2024–25, and we provide more detail on these later in this report. These projects include:

Our group has deep roots, originally being formed in 1994 as Woking Local Agenda 21 (Woking LA21), a collective of Woking residents tackling global environmental concerns on a local scale.

4

Membership, Our Volunteers and Group Leaders

We are pleased to acknowledge our active Volunteers and Group Leaders. Together we achieve so much more, and we hope that we can continue to work together. Our Volunteers are passionate people; whether it is fixing household items at a Repair Cafe, standing at a WEAct stall, tending our Incredible Edible project, reading a grant application or preparing a newsletter, without you we wouldn’t move forward and would not be the group we are.

This annual report is the place to thank our members; we are grateful for your engagement and interest. We hope that we can continue to have you with us. Joining WEAct does not incur a membership fee; however, we ask that people confirm their agreement and support for our aims. Members can resign from WEAct or withdraw at any time by emailing us.

On 22nd August 2024 we had 272 members and another 206 people subscribing to our newsletter. We are encouraging the subscribers to become members. Our Facebook page has 561 followers, and we have 320 followers on Instagram.

WEAct Social

In April 2024 we held a Group Social, a Quiz at the Cricketers Pub in Horsell, which was well received, and this encouraged us to repeat the event in April 2025. The idea behind these events is definitely to bring the wider WEAct family together, and as a fun event, it also enables us to fund raise in an enjoyable way. We are grateful to the staff and managers at the Cricketers for helping us to run these events. We had a WEAct Repair Cafe Quiz Master, Peter Miller (thank you, Peter), and the pub offered a filling supper of Pizza!

In 2025/2026, we hope to add to the social offering from WEAct. Could you be part of this?

5

Legal, Administrative and Organisational Detail

Charity Information for the Year Ended 31st March 2025

Our Governing Body – The WEAct Trustee Board

As the Charity has no share capital, no Trustee or Director has any interest in any shares in the Charity.

Trustees of the WEAct CIO have been:

Rupert Devereux – Co-Chair/Treasurer

Ellen Pirie – Co-Chair

Rachel Basham – Secretary

Nick Gardner

Charlie Hill - Resigned June 2025

Mary I Tobin

Beate Shaw

Hansa Pankhania

All Trustees / Members shown above have served as Board members throughout the period 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025.

Charlie Hill stood down as a Trustee at our AGM in June 2025. We are sad to see him leave our Board; however, we have been delighted to see that his working life has moved distinctly into the Environment / Conservation arena. We would like to record our gratitude and appreciation of his and his partner Vicky’s activities in the group, particularly his team leadership with the Biodiversity Group.

Also at the 2025 AGM, in accordance and following our constitution, which encourages a renewal/refreshing of the Board, Mary Tobin and Bea Shaw were both re-elected to the Board.

6

Policies and Group Protocols

After developing our new CIO Constitution in 2023, the Board worked to update and produce our new organisation policies. We have complied with the Charity Commission’s normal new charity requirement and confirmed that these are arranged and operationally in place before October 2024.

In 2025/2026 the Board will continue to review and ensure that our Policies and Protocols are, if necessary, updated and continue to be drawn to our Members’ and Volunteers’ attention. Our core policies, including The WEAct Safeguarding and Health and Safety Policies, are now available on the group Website.

Recruitment and Training of Trustees

After the year end in March 2025, to anticipate a Trustee vacancy and hopefully to engage new energy to our CIO, we have arranged an advert on the website Reach - - Volunteering (https://reachvolunteering.org.uk/volunteer for climate). We are hopeful to attract new Trustees to the Board and also potentially group leaders, who are so important to our ongoing projects.

Trustees are competent persons who through residence, occupation or employment or otherwise have specialist interest or knowledge in our remit / public benefit. Members can nominate themselves for a Trustee role. Trustees are then voted in by members at the AGM.

The Board requests that our new Trustee(s) are aware of the Gov.uk/Charity Commission guidance on ‘conflicts of interest in a charity’ and complete a registration of interests.

New Trustees will, upon appointment, be provided with an induction pack, which will cover:

The Trustees are responsible for preparing a Trustees’ annual report and financial statements in accordance with applicable law and United Kingdom Accounting Standards (United Kingdom Generally Accepted Accounting Practice). The law applicable to charities in England and Wales requires the charity trustees to prepare financial statements for each period that give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the charity and of the incoming resources and application of resources of the charity for that period. In preparing the financial statements, the trustees are required to:

7

The Trustees are responsible for keeping proper accounting records that disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the charity and to enable them to ensure that the financial statements comply with the Charities Act 2011, the applicable Charities (Accounts and Reports) Regulations, and the provisions of its constitution. They are also responsible for safeguarding the assets of the charity and taking reasonable steps for the prevention and detection of fraud and other irregularities. The Trustees are responsible for the maintenance and integrity of the charity and financial information included on the charity’s website in accordance with legislation in the United Kingdom governing the preparation and dissemination of financial statements.

Basis of Presenting our Accounts

The Trustees consider the Charity Commission’s Guidance, including the ‘Charity Annual Return 2025: Questions Guide’ published in May 2025, to help produce our accounts. It is suggested that there are two formats of presentation for Charities financial accounts: ‘Accrual accounts’ or ‘Receipts and Payments accounts’. As we are a Charitable Incorporated Organisation and a smaller charity in financial terms and currently without Property assets, Endowments or Legacy income, we have selected to present our account as Receipts and Payments accounts. This presentation is a continuation of the basis we used for our Annual report and accounts for the year ending 31[st] March 2024.

We continue to operate with a level of income at which the Charity Commission does not require the group to have an end of year report by a formal auditor of accounts.

Our anticipated budget, the accounts and the group bank accounts are regularly reviewed by the Trustees. Should the group experience a material change in our finance position, we will consider the implications for the future and anticipate that we will promptly engage expert advice and an Independent Examiner / Annual Audit provision.

8

Insurance

The Trustees in January 2025 reviewed and continued our Group/Public Liability Insurance, being an annual policy with Ansvar that was set up from 1st February 2024.

The Trustees continued to regularly consider our Group Risk Register, which was initiated in December 2023.

Bankers

As we suggested in our previous year’s accounts, we have considered our banking requirements and have after year end started to use new Banking arrangements with the Co-Operative Bank – this is an unusual bank in that it has in 2024 returned to Mutual ownership after it was purchased by the Coventry Building Society. Also, since 1992, the Bank has run with a clear Ethical Policy with three pillars: Planet, People and Community. We use two new accounts, including an account that will pay interest on our financial reserves.

After review in 2024, our use of Paypal arrangement has been suspended / discontinued. For our On-line and Bank Card donations, we have moved from using the services of the company Zettle to a new account with the UK-based SumUp Payments Ltd.

Going Concern

The financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis, as the Trustees believe that no material uncertainties exist. The Trustees have considered the level of funds held and the expected level of income and expenditure for 12 months from authorising these financial statements. The budgeted income and expenditure are sufficient with the level of reserves for the charity to be able to continue as a going concern.

Gift Aid

WEAct has now set up a registration with the tax authority HMRC to enable us to additionally claim a return of personal income or Capital Gains tax on the donations that are made to us as Charity ‘Gift Aid’. These gifts require that the Donor declares that they are UK tax payers and that they have paid an appropriate level of tax. We ask our donors to use a paper or online Declaration that is in an approved format with wording provided by HMRC.

After year end 31[st] March 2025, we have arranged through an application to HMRC for a Gift Aid return of tax for the period 14[th] Dec 2023 to 5[th] April 2024 and received a payment of £110.36. Our claim for the period 6[th] April 2024 to 5[th] April 2025 will be arranged, and these grouped Gift Aid donations will appear in our 2026 Accounts.

9

Charitable Donations

We have in 2024/2025 improved our donations arrangements / system and now accept donations at our events on a Contactless card basis and also on-line via our Website : www.wokingenvironmentaction.com.

As a long-established organisation, having been set up in 1994, we are aware and anticipate that we may attract Legacies in the future. Legacies are a very special way that people, after their lifetime, can recognise their preferred, special interests and help support an organisation or registered charity such as WEAct through a stipulated bequest written into their Wills.

The Trustees would like to express our gratitude to Corporate Grant providers and our supporters and donors, as they enable us to continue with our project and our charitable endeavours. The Trustees actively monitor how Corporate grants are spent by our charity and ensure compliance with the requirements of the donor organisation.

10

Accounts - Financial Year Ending 31st March 2025

2024/25 2023/24
Funds brought forward 1st April £9,737.51 £8,220
Income (Receipts)
Government Grants – Nil
Corporate Grant – Affinity Water £5,000
General WEAct Donations – £74
Repair Café – donations £4,960.97
Income – Group Events £400
Utility Company Complaint Compensation £147		 £10,582.00 £8,411
Expenditure (Payments)
Projects – Campaigning costs £620
Biodiversity Group / Ecology Survey – £3,807
Repair Café expenses – £903
WEAct Group Admin AGM & Insurance – £1,182
Group Social expenses – £369
Room hires – donations £402		 £7,284.00 £6,894
Income(decrease)in funds duringtheyear £3,298.00 £1,516
Funds carried forward 31st March
Represented by:
Lloyds Bank Treasurers account balance £423.54
Co-Operative Bank Charity / Community account £10.00
Co-Operative Bank Business Deposit account £7,500.00
Woking Repair Café – Cash in hand
£101.97
Debtors
Corporate Grant AffinityWater Inns & Out £5,000.00		 £13,035.51 £9,737

Notes:

11

This year we are additionally presenting, restating WEAct accounts to show the longer period of just over fifteen months starting from conversion from our previous non profit local group arrangements to our new status as a full English / Welsh Charity – Charitable incorporated Organisation.

Accounts – Restated to show period from WEAct CIO inception 13[th] December 2023 to financial Year Ending 31st March 2025

13thDec 2023
To 31stMarch 2025
Funds at Inception of CharityRegistration 12thDec 2023 £10,339.02
Income (Receipts)
Government Grants – Nil
Corporate Grant – Affinity Water £5,000
General WEAct Donations – £132.05
Repair Café – donations £6,349.47
Income – Group Events £820
UtilityCompanyComplaint Compensation £147		 £12,448.52
Expenditure (Payments)
Projects – Campaigning costs £1,842.12
Biodiversity Group / Ecology Survey – £3,807
Repair Café expenses – £1,802.40
WEAct Group Admin AGM & Insurance – £1,291.01
Group Social expenses – £369
Room hires – donations £640.50		 £9,752.03
Income(decrease)in funds during period £2,696.49
Funds carried forward 31st March 2025 £13,035.51

Notes:

12

WEAct Asset Register

From the inception of our Charity in December 2023, WEAct has maintained an Asset Register recording our resources, our equipment and our Repair Cafe equipment.

In the year ended 31[st] March 2025, we have added Assets of value of £333. We have removed / written off assets, being three Aluminium Ladders purchased for LA21 Operation Owl in 2016; these were lost in store, having been placed in storage within the Borough in approximately 2018. We made several attempts to locate these assets; however, unfortunately, they now remain lost to us.

On 31st March 2025, our assets have a value of £3,340.02 (31st March 2024 £3,006).

In our 2024 Annual Report we suggested that we were considering in future to value assets with a straight-line depreciation of 50% per year. We have not made a revaluation in the Year ending 31[st] March 2025. A revaluation will be arranged during the next year, with an audit of the assets, noting the condition, location and availability of the assets. We continue to look for a convenient Store for our Biodiversity group tools; at present, they are mainly stored in some of our members’ Homes.

Trustees’ Expenses

There were no Trustees’ remuneration or expenses due or paid for the year ended 31st March 2025, other than those incurred directly in the course of the charity’s operations. All such expenses were repaid on production of appropriate vouchers and authorisation.

Approved by the Trustees and signed on their behalf by

Rupert Devereux and Ellen Pirie Dated : 25th June 2025 Trustee and WEAct Co-Chair.

13

WEAct Project Reports Woking Repair Cafe

Each event involves around 100 hours of volunteer time including the fixers, the welcome team, WEAct colleagues and back-office administration.

The New WEAct Banner

The textile team from the Repair Cafe have made a fabulous banner for WEAct to use at events and on marches. Art work and sewing it together took several meetings over many months to produce.

14

We are grateful to the team for making such a brilliant banner, an advert for our Charity. We hope it will be held up at many future meetings and group events.

WEAct Climate Action Group

Aims to engage decision makers to drive action on climate change locally

and nationally and to inspire local people to take action.

Key achievements this year:

Our Priorities for the coming year and since March 2025

15

Food Sustainability

Through the sustainable management of food, we can:

community food groups, including the Woking Food Support Group, getting involved to save even more good food from going to waste.

16

Sustainable Byfleet

This group was set up in Summer 2024, the first of our community sub-groups, championing climate action on a hyper-local scale.

Activities this year include gardening activities, hosting stalls at local events and fairs, and online talks. We ran a stall at the Byfleet Parish Day and have connected with the Byfleet, West Byfleet and Pyrford Residents’ Association.

The group have also worked to roll out existing WEAct projects to the Byfeet area – for example, a new venue for the Repair Cafe. Two planters have been sourced from the Men’s Shed at West Hall and will be situated on Plough Green to provide community access to fresh herbs and patio vegetables.

We would love to find more community champions who can help promote and drive climate action in their local area – speak to us if you want to find out more!

Woking Biodiversity Group / WEAct Nature Group

We preserve and enhance Woking’s green spaces for the benefit of biodiversity.

For our Biodiversity Work Groups, our main tasks involve removing invasive and nonnative species, such as laurel, rhododendron and Himalayan balsam.

We run regular volunteer sessions in 4 green spaces around Woking. Over the past 12 months (to March 2025) we ran 40+ sessions, welcoming 290 volunteers.

The group arranged two Ecology Reports during 2024, for Millmoor Common and St John’s Lye. These reports by Surrey Wildlife Trust will provide the basis for management plans, focusing our voluntary work on these green spaces. The reports are now available for public review on our website.

WEAct has also this year set up a ‘WhatsApp’ Biodiversity community group, and this now includes our wider Nature group with sub-groups including Woking Hedgehogs, WEAct Water Quality Testing Group, a Steering Group and our Our Tree Angels – our Tree Watering volunteers. We can make announcements and share updates, encouraging volunteers to feel more connected to our projects and abreast of local news.

17

New Challenges and Projects

This year we have introduced new projects to ensure that these invasive species do not re-assert their dominance. With the support of the Woodland Trust, in March we planted 420 trees in 2 areas of Old Woking. This was the most popular volunteer session the group has run, attracting 50 volunteers across the 2 days.

Project Wildflower has also started this spring, sowing wildflower in pilot patches across all 4 of our sites.

Our experience and learning will be incorporated into the 2026 plan, including which species thrived, where and why. This project can then be scaled up to increase positive impact.

Woking Hedehogs

We are keen to see our existing hogs living in a safer world with better public engagement and provisions such as Hedgehog highways in our local housing.

Highlights from 2024:

Woking Wings

During 2024 we changed the name of our project Operation Owl , which we started in 2014. The new name enables us to include in our conservation work other birds and even flying mammals (bats). Bats have the similar problems to swifts, swallows and

18

house martins, as nesting and roosting options have been changed and blocked off as we update our homes and restore / convert old barns and agricultural buildings. Our Repair Cafe has kindly built a number of new Tawny Owl boxes, which we are installing locally through the autumn. We then hope to start making and lifting Bat boxes around our locality.

We have continued during the spring nesting period to guide people through the WEAct newsletter to the long standing local Raptor project (the Woking Peregrines project).

Water Quality Testing

We were delighted to have Alistair Young as our Speaker at our June 2025 AGM.. In his role with the River Wey Trust throughout 2024 and 2025, he has been a key support and font of knowledge about our waterways and Water Quality Testing.

South East Rivers Trust kindly donated 10 Water Rangers water testing kits to enable WEAct to set up a water testing initiative, with the support of The River Wey Trust.

Our citizen scientists are now monitoring the River Bourne, River Wey and the Hoe Stream monthly. In 2024, our Water Testing project was led by Charlie Hill and from Summer 2025, it is now co-ordinated by Sue Clements.

Our connection with the ‘Water Rangers’ Water Quality - Testing project https://app.waterrangers.ca/groups/weact - - water quality testing)

continues to give us useful guidance and training, and has enabled our testing results to be part of a much bigger data base of Results.

Sue’s testing in Byfleet includes monthly monitoring for E. coli . This is not currently part of the water testing protocol for WEAct, but as there is no microbiological testing between Guildford and Byfleet so far, it would be worth expanding the programme to test at selected sites, such as upstream and downstream of Wisley sewage works, to help track down where high levels of bacteria are entering the river.

19

WEAct W¢>king Environment Attion 10 Locations Overview l. White Rose Lane Nature Reserve 2. Old Woking 3. M8yford Meadows 4. Chestnut Pond 5. Mimbridge 6. Newark Lane 7. Rive Ditch 8. Holme FaitFt 9. Murrals Bridge 10.Virginia Water Thank you for reading our report. 20