AGM 2026 Details

This year’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) is on Monday 29 June. At the AGM, which will be hosted online, we will be voting:

To elect members to lead OASF
To disapply audit requirements for next year’s accounts

We will also be presenting this year’s OASF accounts.

Election

This year, there are 3 spaces to be elected to bring the OASF board up to its full complement of 10 elected members.

Any OASF member who signed up by Monday 1 June can stand for election; they just need their nomination form signed by two other members (who also signed up by Monday 1 June). We encourage any members who have an interest in helping lead OASF to stand.

We have attached a short description below to give you a sense of what being an elected members means. If you are interested but not yet sure, feel free to contact any of the current elected members who would be happy to give advice or answer questions. We can also help prospective candidates with finding other members to sign their nomination form. Candidates can contact us at hello@oasf.co.uk.

The term for an elected member is normally 3 years but can be staggered to minimise the amount of turnover each year. We will confirm the terms of elected members after the AGM but expect that everyone elected at this year’s AGM will receive a full 3-year-term.

If you would like to stand for election, please complete the nomination form below by Friday 19 June and send it to the election management group via Dom.Lowe@oasf.co.uk.

Existing Board Members

Dom Lowe and Paul Whitehead will reach the end of their elected terms at this AGM and must stand down. They can choose to stand for re-election if they choose to do so. Dom has confirmed he won’t be standing again this year (which is why he can be part of our Election Management Group).

Election Management Group

To ensure this year’s election is open and fair, we have assembled an election management group in line with our election policy (attached below). The members of the group are:

Robert Whitaker, Blackpool Supporters Trust
Allison Dyson, OASF member
Dom Lowe, OASF membership secretary

Disapplying Financial Audit

As a community benefit society, OASF is required to get its accounts professionally audited every year unless its members vote to disapply that requirement at the preceding AGM. If OASF members vote to disapply the financial audit requirement, OASF is instead required to get its accounts independently examined (such as by a qualified accountant), but this would be cheaper than an audit.

Financial auditing is very expensive as it must be done by a specialist auditor. Quotes for this work are around £3,000 to £4,000. That is why we are asking our members to vote to disapply the audit requirements for the next set of OASF accounts, as they did last year.

On its website, the FSA provides advice on the difference between an audit and an independent examination:

"In essence, an audit will assure members that the accounts are right, whilst an independent examination will confirm to members that there is no evidence to suggest the accounts are wrong.

The independent examination does amount to an Independent Review of the Trust Accounts and therefore goes some way to meeting the principle of openness by providing a level of comfort to Trust Members that the accounts presented at the AGM have been subject to an independent review.

Nevertheless, it is for the members of each individual Trust to decide whether the independent examination is sufficient as a form of scrutiny of their Society Board Members."

The vote requires a majority of at least 75% to pass.

Members’ Questions

As part of the AGM, we are inviting OASF members to submit questions for the current elected members to address during the meeting. If you have any questions you would like to submit to the board, please send them via email to hello@oasf.co.uk or use the Contact Us page on our website.

The deadline for submitting questions will be Monday 22 June. We will then collate the questions and answer them during the AGM. If we receive more questions than can be reasonably answered during the AGM, we will answer other questions in a written post afterwards.