Triesman hails Dartington progress as new financial expert joins its board

Dartington Hall Trust has recruited another financial and business specialist as a trustee, underlining its efforts to use more ideas from commerce to create a firmer base for the future.

James Gaisford’s appointment means that four out of the five people on the board have backgrounds heavily rooted in finance and business. The move marks a new step by Lord David Triesman, Dartington’s chair, to reorient the institution away from its historical slant of promoting arts, ecology and social entrepreneurship and towards supporting commercial activities that can bring in revenue.

Triesman said of the new trustee: “James brings a highly relevant skill set and breadth of experience to this next period of our mission; his contribution will be extremely valuable.”

Gaisford is an Exeter-based accountant whose most prominent previous role was a long spell as chief financial officer at Hawksmoor Investment Management, an Exeter financial services firm.  On a social media outlet, Gaisford describes himself as “experienced at acquisitions, disposals, significant restructuring and cost reduction activity” while is also skilled at “bank negotiations and raising finance”.  In this posting, Gaisford added that in all the enterprises with which he has been involved a “common theme …has been the significant growth achieved”.

His enrolment to the board means the sole trustee lacking a strong financial focus, and the only woman, is Georgina Allen, a local councillor from the Green Party. Allen’s career has been mainly in sectors including education and museums. The trust runs the sprawling Dartington estate just outside Totnes. The job of trustees in any charity is to set long-term strategy and to bring new ideas to the attention of managers.

When Triesman took over running Dartington in March 2023, just one out of the other eight trustees, accountant Christopher Maw, was a pure financial specialist. The others had a range of backgrounds spanning arts development, science, education, venture capital, education and healthcare.

In the turbulent period that followed Triesman’s arrival, all the eight trustees he worked with initially left the charity, in some cases after internal disagreements. All five current trustees – except for Triesman – have joined the organisation since April. The reshaping of the board reflects Triesman’s view that Dartington – started in its modern form 100 years ago by the US-based visionaries Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst – had been living beyond its means for years and needed a big change in culture if it was to survive.

In further comments on Dartington, Triesman said: “Good progress has been made in the last two years in reversing decades of spending not matching income, during which time there was no strategy for a long-term future without losses. It is pleasing to see positive change accelerating this year as Dartington celebrates the centenary of the Elmhirst ‘modern era’.”

Dartington also released new figures revealing that in the year 1^st May, the estate had 148,933 car visits, of which 44 per cent were return visits from the previous seven days. The figure is almost four times higher than total car visits in the year to 1^st May 2023 (37,921), the beginning of what Dartington regards as its “turnaround project”.

Employment across all enterprises on the estate quadrupled to more than 1,000 in that two-year period, as the number of tenant businesses grew from 101 to 162 and occupancy of available business space increased from 57 per cent to 95 per cent. The figures fit in with Triesman’s view that – in place of some of the high-flown objectives set in train by the Elmhirsts – the trust should act mainly as a “landlord promoting the legacy of the estate and investing surplus funds into charitable activities”.

Under this philosophy, this practice involves working with partners – mainly from business – to run operations on the estate with their costs borne by the external groups and with Dartington earning a return through rents and other income.  A key focus for Dartington in its new guise, Triesman spelt out in the trust’s annual report published in February, 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”.

One byproduct for Dartington of Gaisford’s appointment is that – in boosting the board membership to five – the number of trustees is in line with the minimum level required by the charity’s statutes to allow for its legal functioning. Had the number stayed at four, under the narrowest interpretation of these statutes, its ability to take key decisions would have been constrained. In recent years Dartington’s trustees have generally numbered considerably more than five, with 14 being the maximum allowed. The trust said: “Further strong candidates have been interviewed, and the board looks forward to announcing additional trustees in due course.”

Gaisford has joined on the Dartington board another financial expert who also worked at Hawksmoor – David Kempton, who was the firm’s chairman for nine years. Kempton joined Dartington as a trustee in June, the same time as Allen.  The fourth recent recruit to the trust is David Lovett, another accountant with extensive business experience. Triesman himself has worked in a variety of jobs, with his main current occupation as a senior adviser at Salamanca, an investment group.

Among Gaisford’s previous roles, he has been a director of companies involved in activities from asbestos removal to care for the elderly. Reflecting non-business interests, he is on the board of InFocus, a charity supporting children with special educational needs.

Behind the changes at Dartington in the past two years was Triesman’s discovery in early 2023 of what he regarded as glaring weaknesses in the accounts that – left unaddressed – he felt could have pushed the organisation into bankruptcy.

After this the Labour peer and a team of consultants enacted a sweeping “crisis plan” involving cuts to jobs and operations that – while controversial – have in Triesman’s view given the trust a good chance of withstanding the pressures of the next few years.

 

While Triesman’s critics have bemoaned the hard-nosed focus of the “new Dartington”, others agree the institution would have found it hard to continue with the pattern of previous years, which had been marked by a string of annual losses, with the deficits made manageable only through sales of land and other assets, along with bank borrowings.   A big challenge for the new board is to find  uses for two huge buildings on the estate – Foxhole and Aller Park – formerly used for education but whose structures have deteriorated so extensively they would need millions of pounds to bring back to use.