CHAIRMANS UPDATE

Welcome to the spring newsletter for 2009. Following positive feedback from our autumn 2008 update, your AR committee felt a further newsletter would be the best way to keep our members updated in respect of AR’s plans for 2009.

As with all organisations at the moment we are acutely aware of the cost pressures that exist for all our members. We know that AR will not be able to attract the sponsorship or indeed the attendance levels at some of our key events this year so we are working hard to maintain those key events at the lowest possible costs and support them financially where we have too. This will mean that we will not commit any major expenditure on research this year. We will however publish the first of our annual market data updates in conjunction with Experian, more details follow in Will McKee’s update below. We do want to focus our lobbying efforts on what short term changes the government may be able to make, particularly around planning legislation, that could help the market during the recession and we will keep you informed as to progress. If anyone has any specific ideas on this point then please contact Will directly.

We will maintain our event schedule as detailed in Louise’s update below and as usual I would encourage you to attend where you are able. We are particularly keen to maintain our autumn conference following last year’s success. It remains important for the industry to meet at events like this to get up to date views on the state of the market and provide the opportunity for key stakeholders to present their opinions.

Finally we know that this can be a difficult time for some individual members who may find themselves without employment due to current market conditions. The committee has agreed that we will renew membership for these members without charge so they can continue to benefit from the organisations networking events and keep up to date with current market conditions. If anyone is in this position or knows of someone in this position, please ensure they contact Louise to update their details to enable their membership to be renewed.

I wish all our members the best for the rest of the year and look forward to seeing you at an AR event soon.

Yours sincerely
 

Philip Bell-Brown