Over the last 18 months, we have witnessed a considerable shift in the focus of the BNTVA some of which has clearly been to the detriment of our key responsibilities. The core of the Trustee board was increasingly concerned that something was not going right and we decided to halt all activity and take a full inventory of our situation.

It was immediately apparent that there were some large problems that needed addressing and it was decided to invite a special advisor to review and assure all the governance, systems and practices within the organisation. A further requirement was also made to review the activities of the last year or so.

As trustees, the results of this review will help us ensure the viability of the organisation and enable us to move forward with certainty.

Unfortunately, Mr Razzell decided he no longer wished to work for the organisation and submitted his resignation as did Michelle Harding. Ed McGrath was planning on retiring early this year and he stood aside to facilitate the review. We thank these people for their service to the BNTVA and the wider community.

The review is ongoing and we hope to be discussing findings and recommendations in the next couple of weeks. We will then be in a position to move forward and begin providing all the key services our supporters deserve.

There are some long-standing issues that were not being properly addressed and we apologise for this along with this update on where we are at the moment:

Phone line: our main phone number has been down at least since we called the halt action. This wasn't intentional but we discovered it was due to a technical issue, it also appears to have been an intermittent fault for some considerable time. We now have someone looking into it.

Because of the constraints of the current board size we are going to revert to an answerphone service where you leave your name, number and we will call you back.

Website: it was noticed that our website had been reverted to an earlier version thus meaning any recent news or updates had gone, a further situation resulted in a loss of access to correct it. We have now resolved this and recovered the website to the version we had at the end of last year. We are still checking through and have some important updates to make.

Magazine: this has been one of the biggest complaints about last year was the lack of a magazine. The board feel this is totally unacceptable, it is our main medium of communication with our community and we apologise for the terrible service of the last year. This is one of the essential parts of the review that we will be concentrating on and we will report as soon as possible.

Shop orders: we have discovered that there are some outstanding shop orders. Several orders were satisfied last week but we are currently unable to access the bulk of our stock. We have been reaching out to those affected but if you have ordered an item not yet received it please email Shelly s.grigg@bntva.com

Coffin Drapes and Funerals: We have a couple of coffin drapes that can be requested for funerals. We would normally have more, but again, we are unable to access them at the moment.

We would like to remind people that for funeral services our Standard Bearer Ron Watson is available. We do have another national standard but there is currently a vacancy so if you would like to volunteer we could really do with someone in the North/North West, If you want to learn more about this volunteering opportunity please email office@bntva.com

With Ed departing the Chair our Vice Chair, David Bostwick covered the role. His fellow trustees have unanimously supported Davids's appointment as the new Chair of the BNTVA.

As we have said, there are currently only four of us running the charity, two of us also work so we do get a bit stretched. Please bear with us through this trying time. We welcome your understanding and support.

David Bostwick, Wesley Perriman, Shelly Grigg and Andi Jones.