National Trust ‘stifling dissent’ by blocking members from AGM

THE National Trust has been accused of blocking critics from its annual meeting after members were turned away from attending in person.

Trust members who applied to attend the AGM in Bath today have been forced to watch online following a surge of interest in this year’s meeting.

The charity said the capacity for the venue was based on the same number who applied to attend last year’s meeting. But it received more than double the expected number of applications for in-person attendance amid heated debate over the direction of the charity.

The members’ campaign group Restore Trust is backing its own candidates for the seven vacancies on the council, which appoints the chairman, deputy chairman and members of the board of trustees.

Among those to be turned away from attending in Bath today is Tom Oliver, a landscape architect and conservation farmer who worked for the National Trust from 1997 to 2002.

Mr Oliver is backing a resolution at the meeting for the trust to drop its support for the tunnelling of the A303 through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. “The system for attending the AGM seems to have been designed to discourage reasonable dissent and suppress legitimate challenges to actions of the trust,” Mr Oliver said.

“One can detect a faint flavour of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Nothing could be better designed to indicate that the trust is well aware of its errors of judgement and wishes to avoid proper scrutiny.”

The National Trust said it would try to give members attending both online and in-person an equal opportunity to contribute at the AGM during the question-and-answer sessions.

About 2,000 people are expected to log in to watch the AGM online.

Mr Oliver added: “I was made a life member by a woman who knew the founders of the trust.

“I count myself very fortunate to have worked for the organisation. I am not a natural critic of the trust.

“But the senior paid management are increasingly a law unto themselves.

“They are betraying the founders, their own staff, their volunteers, and most of all their members. They have gone too far.”

The charity’s trustees say that the route has been carefully chosen to avoid archaeology.

A National Trust spokesman said: “Seats at the AGM have this year been allocated by a ballot through our independent election services provider Civica to ensure fairness to all members.”

‘They are betraying the founders, their own staff, their volunteers, and most of all their members’