National Trust is urged to bring in sweeping reforms

The National Trust Trust will today consider proposals for major changes to the way it is governed. A review suggests its three million members have no idea about how its decisions are reached.

Reforms are needed to create greater transparency and to reflect the organisation's change in size, says the review, which was commissioned by the trust's ruling council and chaired by Lord Blakenham, a former chairman of the Financial Times and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The charity's membership has increased from 152,000 to more than three million, since it was last reformed by Act of Parliament in 1971; its budget from £2.4m to a hundred times that amount and its visitor numbers have climbed to 12 million a year.

It is "unrealistic" to expect a 52-member ruling council, that meets only four times a year, to run the NT – Britain's largest membership organisation. "The group ... however competent and committed its members, cannot satisfactorily achieve the levels of involvement which trustees must have," says the Blakenham review. There is also "considerable duplication of effort" among committees and it is "unclear where decisions are taken".

The unpaid members of the council and committees were often unclear about their roles and a number of them felt "frustrated or dissatisfied".

The report also considers the process for selecting committee members to be "neither sufficiently consistent nor sufficiently transparent" and "too heavily reliant on informal approaches ... people without existing contacts within the trust often feel that there is a circle into which they cannot break."

There was "deep suspicion" on the part of a significant number of the trust's members about the proxy voting system, under which the chairman tops up votes for members of the council according to a list approved by the trust.

In June last year, the trust said it was examining different voting systems after criticisms that the retiring chairman, Charles Nunneley, used his powers to keep supporters of stag-hunting off the ruling council.

A "one person, one vote" system of voting was reported to be under consideration. Under the present system, the trust chairman uses proxy votes to place favoured candidates onto the 52-member ruling body. Until last year members were not even told how the chairman's votes were allocated.

The review group, which consisted of one other independent person and three members of the trust council, recommends the appointment of a new group of 12 trustees to act as a governing body and meet eight times a year, with the majority of its members drawn from the council. Proxy voting would be abolished and replaced by a postal ballot for elections to the council.

The council would remain as the "conscience of the Trust" and ensure that the trustees were doing their job properly.

Lord Blakenham said he believed the necessary changes could be achieved through a Parliamentary scheme instead of an Act of Parliament.

When the director general, Fiona Reynolds, took up her post in January 2001, she warned that the trust must make itself more relevant. "There's a big debate about social inclusion and the fact that the trust can be seen as an organisation that's middle-class and slightly remote," she said. "What we're moving towards is a more human and more personal explanation of the importance of our heritage."