Last year I spoke about how we had coped with Covid, how we’d continued to be effective and relevant, and how, if we could do that despite the limitations of Covid, how much more we could do when we returned to normality.

Normality hasn’t quite returned, and we and the pub, club, beer and cider industries face a whole new set of challenges, from the cost of living crisis, to the war in Ukraine, to a government in a constant state of flux.

But as we did with Covid, we’re ensuring we’re on the front foot, and being proactive rather than reactive. As you’ll see from the reports from our committees and Nik’s speech, we continue to be financially strong, continue to effectively campaign on the key issues, have seen recruitment begin to head in the right direction, and have run a full festival programme.

We’ve made a lot of changes on the staff team to make sure we’re best placed to serve the membership and deliver our objectives.

We promoted Anita Newland-Smith to chief support officer following Ken Owsts’ retirement and she has been working to strengthen the finance and support teams, improving our HR provision for staff and bringing in more accounting expertise to the team.

The support team is continuing to roll out tools to those of you in branches to make your jobs as treasurers, regional finance officers and festival organisers much easier.

Gregory Rycroft has been appointed as our chief information officer, a role which was a key recommendation of the Digital Futures Working Group. We’ve grown the IT team, to ensure that our ambitious and essential Digital Futures Programme will be delivered – helping us collect and use our data better, and deliver it in better ways, benefiting our campaigning, our festivals, our branches and our members – as well as providing a key recruitment benefit to potential members.

You and your fellow members donate your time to collect a vast and valuable amount of data in your branches – data about pubs, about breweries, about clubs, about cider producers. Until now we’ve had lots of different databases, not all of which play well with each other, and while the data we gather is vital for the Good Beer Guide, we don’t use it to its full potential. That’s going to change, with better data management and organisation, and better ways of using that data. You’ll see the benefits, not only in our national campaigning and communications, but in the tools and data you’ll be able to access and use locally in your branches.

We’ve recreated the chief of communications and campaigns role, and I’m delighted to welcome Jane Eason to the staff team. Jane is a long serving volunteer, brings with her huge amounts of campaigning and communications experience from her previous jobs working for the Fire Chiefs Council and Tamworth Borough Council, and is fortunate enough to live a few minutes away from our current pub of the year. She’s with us this weekend and I’m sure you’ll all make her feel welcome.

For an organisation our size, and with a small campaigns and communications staff team, we’ve punched above our weight for many years – establishing a high profile for the organisation and running a hugely wide range of campaigning activity across the four nations.

Jane will be able to bring new focus and perspective to our campaigns and communications activity, taking it up another level, developing our national and branch level campaigning and further improving our communications channels which will benefit both our internal audience of members and branches, and also strengthen our profile in the wider world.

Covid showed us how essential our festivals were to recruiting and retaining members. While our retention stayed high, our drop in member numbers over the last two years just about matches the number we would have usually expected to recruit at our events over the same period, which we were unable to run due to Covid restrictions.

One of our key objectives over the coming year has to be to win back all those members who didn’t join or rejoin at festivals. With this in mind we’ve restructured the staff membership team to focus our efforts on recruiting members, particularly at festivals. Michael Lovell joined the staff last year and is proving extremely effective as membership marketing officer and Laura Coles has joined us as our first staff member solely dedicated to supporting recruitment at festivals.

We’ve rebuilt a stronger and better staff team, and as you’ll see from the financial reports, we’ve done it without substantially increasing the staff budget. We’re using your money in the most effective way to provide a brilliant staff focused on the things that matter to the Campaign over the next few years – even more effective campaigning and communication; developing the tools to make your work as volunteers easier; supercharging our reputation as the go-to place for information about beer, cider, pubs and clubs; and bringing more people back into the Campaign to volunteer at our festivals, get more involved in your branches, or just – and this is equally important – provide funds to allow us to carry out CAMRA activities.

I believe it doesn’t matter whether things are normal or not. What our staff team and your fellow volunteers continue to prove is we can cope, whatever is thrown at us. We will continue to campaign, we will continue to run brilliant festivals and we will return to membership growth. That is our new normality.