Role of the PASB

For me, the most important role of the PASB should be to provide oversight and scrutiny of the board, in order to make sure that the club is operating sustainably and with financial prudence. For this it will need access to financial reports, regular meetings with the board and access to details about the club’s strategic planning (commercial, financial etcetera).

Secondary to this is to ensure that the club is properly focused on improving the experience of supporters in every aspect of their contact with the club. The PASB should also be ensuring that the club recognises its role within the community and that it plays an ever increasing and more positive role within it.

Thirdly, the PASB need not concern itself with establishing new ways and means for supporters to feed concerns and desires back to the club. There are already plenty of routes of communication with the club, either directly or through the Trust or one of the supporters groups. With this role already being performed both large scale, close season survey, and small scale, kiosks, there is no need to distract the PASB from its core purpose of steering the clubs financial and community strategies. The Trust are also in the early stages of working with supporters’ groups to facilitate regular meetings to ensure that there is another route for two way communication between club and fans. It would, however, not be a bad thing if those involved with the PASB were to get involved with these communication channels to make them perform better and ensure that more supporters are able to give their feedback.

There is absolutely no point in attempting to establish some sort of club sponsored trust. The PASB should be focused on its governance role and allow the Trust and supporters’ groups to continue the work they already do with regards communication and working with the community. Considering that all but one of the candidates for the election are Trust members and that the rest of the board will comprise of supporters’ group reps and Trust reps the PASB will consist of people already doing this.

Process

So far the process in establishing the PASB has been nothing short of a complete shambles. I argued at the time that, since this is a long term project, we should focus on getting it defined properly so that people knew what it was before we started to form the board. Instead what we are seeing is a board which is poorly defined, and therefore receiving very little interest from supporters. On top of this, we have also seen an election start to be run before the process for running it was decided upon, even to the extent that candidates were sought before who was running the election was decided. In future, if an elected format is the best way to deliver good governance, candidates should not be sought until the election is properly organised, the electorate should be given far more information about how to stand and what it is they are standing for and then, before ballots are sent out, there should be more official channels by which the electorate can engage with candidates. Hustings the day after the information is sent out is not enough to properly inform the electorate.

Principle of the PASB

It is my personal belief that we would have been better served by defining the governance role of the PASB and then allowing our independent Trust and independent supporters’ groups to establish a committee of people to perform this governance/oversight role. This would have done away with the confusion surrounding why this exists when we already have a Trust, and, would have allowed us to avoid an election fought on popularist grounds in favour of already democratic organisations appointing people with the appropriate skills and expertise needed to properly scrutinise the board and play a key part in the governance structure of the club. I am yet to be convinced that the current election format is the best way of this role being performed.

It is also a shame that it has been decided to create another organisation for interaction with supporters when so many already exist. With the Trust, the regional supporters’ groups, the Senior Greens and many more already in existence I would have preferred them to have been fully embraced and to have been given this role. I am not sure that the mechanism for achieving supporter participation in governance has had the desired effect as it appears to have led to confusion and indifference rather than serving to make supporters feel more a part of the structure of the club. I think we would have been better served by fostering good working relationships between all of the groups and the club, with them being trusted to find, from amongst our supporters, people with the relevant skills to perform a governance role and being trusted to be able to establish themselves a means of two way communication between fans and club. I would have preferred to have seen the PASB as a sub-section of the Trust - perhaps enshrined within the company articles as part of a share purchase - which was run by it and the supporters’ groups independently of the club. I not only think that this would have worked better but also believe that it would be more stable in the long term and more legitimate, due to the independence of the supporters groups.

Having said all of the above, I do not see this as a threat to the Trust but as an opportunity to achieve some of the aims and objectives of the organisation. The only way that this can threaten the Trust is if the Trust fails to take this opportunity and lets it be a threat to its relevance. It is my firm belief that the Trust should be the leader of this process and that any PASB constitution should reflect the aims and objectives of the Trust and be reflective of the research and principles of Supporters Direct, who work to ensure more supporter participation within football clubs and to protect their futures. This may not be my preferred route for a supporter governance role but it’s what we’ve got and therefore what we will have to work with.

You raise some excellent points John, but as an exile and therefore not a "member", I am excluded from having a vote, despite being a Trust member and forking out for Argyle Player to listen to games I can't attend.

Personally I would scrap this initial election due to all of the flaws that have been outlined by the few people who can be bothered to have an opinion on the PASB, and that elite band of people could meet in a phone-box once a month.

We have a candidate who has been accused of being hired as a private investigator to obtain my address by another supporter, and rumours that candidates are being warned that if they post on ATD then their campaign maybe compromised to say the least!

No women or youngsters came forward to express an interest within the agreed timeframe, despite there being several well known young supporters who use the online forums, including Cobi Budge who approached the Club President to see if he could be considered, only to be told that the Club President had nothing to do with the setting up of the PASB, which is quite clearly not true.

If this has to go ahead I would start afresh with The Trust given 3 nominations, the supporters groups between them 2 nominations, as they don't all appear to be interested, and have a couple of nominations from anyone else, not affiliated to any group.

The number of board members could be changed to suit but Trust members could vote for their nominated people, the Supporters Group get another chance to vote for their nominations etc.

The results should also be published to see the level of participation in the votes and if after 2 or 3 years the voting numbers were as tiny as I believe they will be, then the whole thing should be scrapped.

Thta's the opinion of someone who is not eligible to have a vote mind you!

Here's a thought for everyone to get their latent IQ around.
So the PASB has always been touted by Mr Brent as a fans' body to ensure the club is being run on a sound financial footing.
So when Mr Brent doesn't come up with any money to properly fund this football club in the time honoured English tradition and in the manner 95 % of our competirors are funded, the fans, in the form of the GASboard, will fully support his stance as being frugally and fiscally correct.

Can anyone at all see the joker in the pack here ?

The first test when they come up against an idea promoted by The Prez that the GasBoard don't like. Will he scream and scream until he makes himself sick so that Brent capitulates and over rules his advisory group. The Pres has form for micro managing things like the programme writers till he gets his or his 'real mates' own way.

A very good post John with, as GJ said, excellent points.

As a supporter of argyle for over 40 years and unable to get to many games in Plymouth, I am also excluded from voting so my feeling is how can James Brent say this is more representative than the trust. He seems to be saying that if you are not a member of the trust (and I am not) then they will not listen to me.

I have, in the past, made my feeling known to the National Trust about a place I have visited and they have always listened to what I have said and once, after taking my details, contacted me about my comments. I am not a member of that organisation either so why wouldn't they take my opinion into account? It is about making the experience of visiting one of their sites as good as they can.

This is a stated aim of Mr Brent, to make the match day the best it can for the club customers, both home and away fans. Sadly what he, Peter Jones, the prez and his right hand man seem to forget or choose to ignore, that one of the most important parts of the day, is the football. If the football is shit then the day is not as good as it could be. Yes all teams have bad games and even clubs like Chelsea and Man U lose.

I too have heard that candidates are being warned that if they post on here then their chances of being elected are slim. How can anyone have faith in a body that has that sort rumour hanging over it? You only have to read pasoti to see the suppression of any sort of dissent on there by the admin of the site and will stop at nothing to silence posters on here by causing trouble for this site. And let’s not forget the campaign of attacks on the trust by people too cowardly to say it under their own name but used multi accounts. People who are now closely linked to the club. People who used their influence to remove a fan who had given their time for free to write articles for the match day programme because they post on here. People that Mr Brent allegedly trusts and calls friends!

If the AFT was the link between the fans and the club I could go on here or on the trust site and post a question about what I felt about my match day experience. Sadly when the pasb is in place and it will be at any cost and any trick these people can pull. I won't be able, like many other fans, to make my feelings known for fear of reprisals because I dare to post on a site not controlled by these people and have an opinion of my own.

John's comments give me hope that the good guys still outnumber the bad guys at a time when I was starting to question if that really was the case.