October 2025
Autumn has arrived and I wanted an opportunity to update you all on the outcomes from the Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) held at the Roman Crown on 28th September. We had residents from 24 properties present and the usual matters, last year’s minutes and accounts were dealt with. These are available to view at www.romanparkclub.co.uk. Our Treasurer, Brian Southern, announced that subject to some provisos’ the Equal Contribution (EC) for 2026 would be £70.00 plus VAT. Invoices with be sent out in December and the monies are due by 31st January 2026. Once again, we will allow payment by 3 instalments of £28.00 each due on 31st January / 28th February and 31st March 2026. Draft minutes from this year’s OGM have also been posted on our website where these provisos are set out in more detail.
As prescribed by the Declaration of Trust the longest serving Trustee, Lee Muncey, stepped down but offered himself for re-election. Following a unanimous vote Lee was re-elected to the Board.
I know traditionally we have held the OGM on a Sunday morning, but I would be interested in hearing residents’ views about alternatives which may make it easier for more to be able to attend.
We presented a summary of the trading performance of the Roman Crown and although use of the function room has been good overall trading has not. Consequently, a decision has been taken to reduce opening hours thereby cutting costs. It has been one of our main focuses this past year to assist them whenever we were able. A useful discussion took place, and it was agreed to try and establish a bridge between the Trustees, estate residents and the Roman Crown by setting up a Friends of Roman Crown (FORC) group to try and increase local footfall. We are, therefore, calling for volunteers able to commit to 2-3 hours per month initially. If you are interested, please email us at admin@romanpark.co.uk and we will pass your contact details on.
We then moved on to the second issue we had been tasked with at the April 2024 Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) i.e. the investigation of a possible sale of the site moving forward. We explained that we had commissioned 4 reports. These were from Howes Percival, giving the legal restrictions, a topographical report regarding the land, architects drawings of possible future usage and a report from a pre-planning specialist. The purpose being to establish the viability of trying to sell the property with designated planning consent. Finally, Louch Shadlock, who have been guiding us since we began this exercise have produced an overarching report which is available to read on our website www.romanparkclub.co.uk. We did print out a couple of copies in preparation for the OGM and so if you do not have access to the internet and would like to borrow a hard copy, please let one of the Trustees know.
And finally, we are moving toward email communication thereby speeding up the process. We have long recognised that keeping in effective communication with our owners is difficult. We have been talking for some time about having an effective outbound email facility for both billing and tracking of the Equal Contribution payments and communications about meetings, events and information surrounding the future of the Club. It is now time to start to implement the use of such a facility. The first phase, which we expect to start in early November, is a limited use trial with a small group of volunteer users.
The purpose of the trial is to test out the chosen software and to make sure that owners can opt in and opt out successfully from communications in line with GDPR principles. We can also experiment with the formats of newsletters and other communications.
The effort expected from volunteers should be limited and is really going to be confirmation that actions you have chosen are correctly executed. Of course, if you want to become more deeply involved in the trial that would be more than welcome.
The other advantage of the trial is that we can have the software for free initially to make sure that we have chosen the right package.
In total we would need around 20 volunteers for this to be an effective trial
If you are interested then please email us at admin@romanpark.co.uk.
So that’s it for now. Although this newsletter is being delivered to every household on both Bancroft Park and Blue Bridge I expect this to be the last as we establish our email communication
Regards Sharon Taylor
Chair of Trustees