“Landlord” Dartington calls time on old order and sets sights on “unbundling” strategy  

Dartington Hall Trust has unveiled details of a radical “unbundling” strategy through which it will hand control of many internal activities to outside groups to inject new life into its estate and build a “sustainable future”.

The charity runs the historic Dartington estate just outside Totnes. From now on it will act mainly as a “landlord promoting the legacy of the estate and investing surplus funds into charitable activities”, according to the trust’s long-awaited most recent annual report, published this week.

The report is for the year to the end of August 2023, with the result being that the financial details inevitably have a highly backwards-looking slant. As expected, the document – which also discloses a new £3m bank loan – says the trust continued to run a large deficit in the financial year under review, showing a loss of £4.69m, little changed from the £4.64m shortfall in 2021/22.

The formal disclosure of the new strategy marks a big departure from the organisation’s previous stance in which it has taken pride on running for itself a range of diverse operations from arts and education to agriculture and further back, glassmaking.

The trust – which this year is celebrating its 100th anniversary of its establishment in a modern form – has had a tough time since early 2023 during which it has pushed through swingeing job losses to cut costs and stave off what a new set of managers has viewed as potential bankruptcy.  In the report, politician-turned-banker Lord David Triesman – who took over as the trust’s chair in March 2023 – says Dartington’s charitable status is “not a charter to make continual losses“ based on what he says has been a  “decades-long practice of funding operating losses through disposal of land and other assets”.

The Labour peer dismisses the approach of the management regimes running Dartington in recent years as “a perennial combination of disposals, unpredictable benefaction and hope“.

As part of the revamped operational style, Triesman and interim chief executive Robert Fedder have recruited a new team of managers to take charge of the estate, with most of them employed as consultants. Dartington’s new objective, Triesman says, is “not to generate significant profits” but recover the high costs of maintaining a historic estate and “allow us to invest from time-to-time improve our offer for members, visitors and other stakeholders”.

The trust will, he asserts, no longer view as a priority the need to “prop up unviable propositions [operations run by Dartington] however long their association with the trust may be”.

Triesman’s ideas on unbundling come from the playbook of many of the businesses the peer – who worked as a minister in the Labour governments of the early 2000’s – has been associated with in recent years as a director of merchant bank Salamanca. By parcelling out previously “vertically integrated” operations to third parties, such groups can cut employment costs and transfer risks.

While such ideas can work efficiently when well executed, they involve a possibility of the overseeing business losing sight of key objectives and may damage their overall reputation if some of the outside groups manage their affairs badly.  In line with this new slant, the trust says it “expects that the number of people it employs will reduce but that employment across the estate through third parties, as well as activity and footfall, will significantly increase”.  Employment at the trust has fallen from 353 in August 2023 to about 200 in the summer of 2024. The charity has not given an update.

Among the internal activities at Dartington that have been ended during the Triesman era is the long-running and large-scale Dartington music summer school and festival, which has been replaced by a smaller, less costly music event centred on singing that took place last year and is being repeated this summer.

The charity says it is reviewing the “potential for further music summer schools, possibly with a different focus yet again, and on a larger scale if they are financially viable”.

The trust also unveiled what amounted to an eviction order for Schumacher College, a renowned education centre for ecology previously run as a core Dartington operation. Here – in a nod to the idea that the college could start a new era as an independent venture untied to Dartington – the trust reports that it continues to “consider viable options for the college to sustain itself” on a model based possibly on organising “financially viable, unaccredited courses”.

In examples of previously internal operations at Dartington where the trust is either looking to hand control to outside groups – or has already done so – the report says it is in “advanced discussions” with potential “strategic partners” keen to take over Dartington’s Cider Press Centre which is mainly for retail but which has been moribund for years.

The partners, the trust says, have submitted proposals for occupying the entire Cider Press as tenants, “maintaining a focus on sustainably sourced food”.

In other projects with a food theme, How Now Dairy, a group specialising in sustainability and organic agriculture, has taken a 20-year lease on 400 acres of farm land on the estate as a centre for a 100-strong herd of cows. Each cow will be  electronically tagged using chip-based identifiers, making it easier for them to be milked on an individual basis using what the trust says will be the latest robotic technology which reduces the need for human involvement.

The opening on the estate – in previously little-used arts studios – of a gym run by Devon-based LED Leisure has gone well, the trust says, with demand for memberships exceeding expectations with the offer of reduced rates for local people being “well received”. Meanwhile the charity is at “an advanced stage” of talking to a business tenant about occupying High Cross House, regarded as a 1930s architectural masterpiece but which has fallen into disuse and is a poor state of repair.

Total income at the trust in 2022/23 was £13.85m, down from £14.96m. Cash at the bank – a key parameter for financial reporting – was £3.46m at the end of the latest year, a fall of roughly £1m over the 12 months previously.

Publication of the report is almost eight months behind the schedule called for by the Charity Commission and was one of the factors behind the regulator starting a “regulatory compliance probe” into Dartington last December.

However, the fact that the report is now filed may well assuage fears at the commission that more details into the trust’s operation need investigating. The trust said: “We continue to engage with trustees of the Dartington Hall Trust as part of an ongoing regulatory compliance case.”

The report  says that since August 2023 the trust has completed the sale of “non-core estate land” for £2.66m – an area known as Yarner Peak and Coplands  – in a transaction that has been in the pipeline for some time. This will, the trust says, offset the scale of what has been a continued loss and reduction in cash flow for the 2023/24 financial year.

If the trust can this time stick to the commission’s timetable for financial reporting, the 2023/24 report will be published by the end of June.

Resulting from the trust’s financial difficulties, the charity says it was able to amend the terms of a 20-year loan of £3m from Triodos Bank agreed in 2021, to reduce any risk that the trust might breach its banking covenants, which are conditions placed by banks on borrowing to reduce the chance of default. Triodos said: “We are not able to disclose the commercial details of our lending agreement. We have been working closely with Dartington Hall Trust through these challenging times and continue to be as supportive as possible”

In a further sign that the trust has found it can find lending agencies willing to support it in a difficult period, Dartington has borrowed another £3m – this time for three years – from investors linked to UK Agricultural Finance, a group specialising in supporting farm-based enterprises.  Dartington says the money will provide it with “sufficient working capital to complete the process whereby the trust will become self-financing”. UK Agricultural Finance declined to comment.

Consultancy payments by the trust were £107,000 in the year to the end of August 2023. While detailed information about who received the payments is not disclosed, most of the money is likely to have gone to four key people brought in after Triesman took over to manage much of the trust’s activity.  These people – all appointed on an interim basis – include Fedder along with personnel head Amanda Brown, administration officer Adrian Walters and Chris Car-Barney, in charge of commercial operations. Since all four started their work at Dartington in June or July 2023, the numbers in the report give a highly partial view of their total payments over a 12-month period.

Also included in the total consultancy money is likely to have been payments to other outside bodies such as the BCLP law firm and Buchler Phillips, a restructuring firm called in by Triesman as an adviser.