11. Section 7, para 5 is unconstitutional. You cannot appeal to the same committee that votes to expel a member. The idea is correct but the wording is bad. eg there is a reference to 'him', what about 'her'.
It is very constitutional, and again comes from the WHR constitution:

The Executive Committee shall have power, after proper investigation (a) to reject any application for membership of Winchester Radio, and (B) after proper enquiry to expel any member acting to the detriment of Winchester Radio after giving such member written notice of the intention to expel him or her from Winchester Radio, which notice shall state that the member has a right to appear before the Executive Committee and to be heard in his or her own defence after giving not less than 28 days notice in writing to the Chairman of his or her intention to do so. The decision of the Executive Committee as to the rejection of the applications for membership or the expulsion of members shall be final, save that no expulsion shall be valid unless it complies in all respects with the provisions of this Clause.

(The WHR constitution includes the para "All references to any one Gender should be considered as referring to both", but the sexual equality act means it automatically includes "her" without any need to say so)

I think you will find it is quite normal for a committee to have the power (on behalf of its membership) to decide who may / may not be members. Its interesting to note that membership of WHR requires acceptance by the committee, whilst with GAGB, that is not the case.

12. Section 7, para 6 is again badly worded and some stuff missing. eg How members are contacted and with what notice. As it stands 3 members can agree to have a meeting without even contacting the others.
That doesn't need to be in the constitution (and its not in the WHR one either, where we DO have meetings). I agree that something needs to go into the Standing Orders though.

I specifically left out the requirement for notice for a meeting, as there WILL be times (eg New Forest meeting) when a meeting HAS to be held at short notice... but then covered the potential problems by requiring ratification later on.

At WHR, as Chief Engineer, I may need to do something that affects the organisation at very short notice. In such a case, I would probably speak with "a representive selection" of the rest of the committee (on the phone) and take action, but would then ask for full ratification at the next committee meeting.

13. Section 8b, last sentance, I would suggest - Any expenditure must have prior approval of at least three members of the Executive Committee.
Yes, good idea, much more workable.

14. Section 8e, should read - A independantly audited statement of accounts for the previous financial year shall be submitted by the Chairman to the members annually in January.
WHR just changed its constitution to remove the word "audited", and replaced it with "examined", and turns over about £8k per year. A legal "audit" would probably cost as much as the funds themselves! So there's no way I can support the inclusion of the word "audited".

I think any accounts will be sufficiently simple that all members will be able to "independantly examine" them!

When turnover reaches say £1k pa, then maybe external / independant examination is more relevant.

15. Section 9, Chair - these are too restrictive. What happens if the Chair is unavailable there is no option for replacement. My suggestion is to remove this bit completely.
The reaason for having a "job description" there is (a) so that potential chairmen know what is expected; (B) lets you see if a current chairman is doing the job!

Also, if you don't define what specific roles that person has, then why HAVE that role? That's indeed the reason that, at the moment, there are "5 other committee members", rather than web-master, secretary, treasurer etc.....

So what ARE the chairman's specific responsibilities? All suggestions welcome! (I can say that coz I'm NOT chairman :-) )


16. Section 11 - It would be better to restrict changes to constitution to 'once a year', as you would when having an AGM.
Why? it's a needless restriction, and could actually cause problems. For example, we change the constitution, to discover that something we just did was not legal... oops!

At WHR (mainly for convenience) changes are *usually* made at the AGM, but I know that last year we did one part-way through the year, as we wanted to reduce the size of the committee, and wanted the changes in place for the annual elections at the AGM.