How CRT looks for volunteers

Happy New Year by the way.

It looked to me like CRT bolloxed up their Council elections before the voting even closed. It was only NBTA's vigilance that has prevented the complete disenfranchisement of several hundred boaters with restricted licences.

Simultaneously CRT were advertising for another set of volunteers - new Trustees.

It's still pretty unclear what went wrong with the Council voting process, despite what CRT have said: CRT have stated that Electoral Reform Services (who are running the election process for CRT), were sent the appropriate details but failed to issue voting instructions to those people on restricted licences.

Sounds pretty fishy to me? If what they say happened actually happened, CRT must have sent details that included some marker to say who was on a restricted licence or else how would ERS have been able to separate those people out from the rest?

Did ERS really then unilaterally make a decision to exclude those people on restricted licences and why would they do that without instructions from CRT?

I smell bullshit!

Curiously Narrowboatworld reported that people who believed themselves eligible to vote were told their names weren't on the list and that ERS were going back to check with CRT in case the lists they had were not complete.

It was also clear that at best CRT's customer records were far from complete at the outset judging by the many complaints across social media and elsewhere that people did not receive notice to stand or nominate candidates. Now I can just about of believe that, having in the past seen how hard it is to keep membership lists elsewhere up to date.

Then there is the report of strange goings on around the nomination of a candidate in the Friend constituency.

This Trustee selection process by contrast is being given a little more care it seems, being run by a specialist agency Saxton Bamfyled. Among other things their website says they are " pioneers in research-intensive executive search...". That sounds like what we used to know as head hunting - or in other words they actively go out and look for candidates and invite people to apply.

A slightly different approach here one thinks?

In the event the Council elections were probably most notable from the apparent lack of interest reported.

One has to wonder whether Saxton Byfiled have been engaged to help filter the rush of candidates wanting to be CRT trustees or whether as I suspect, their role is in fact to try and drum up interest in taking a taste from a poison chalice?