The value of County Associations

Question

Our membership to the County Association is by automatic renewal. The fee in mho is disproportionate to the service it offers members, communication poor, training courses stale and in the main benefits Officers with networking and CDP opportunities mirroring SLCC.
Is there anyone here who is no longer a member of their County Association?  Do you buy in in house bespoke training or alternatively any suggestions on how to get better value from our subscription. We already pay a substantial amount for HR advisors and related insurance elsewhere.

TIA

Answer 1

That's a difficult one.  You're certainly not alone in questioning the value of local associations, especially for small parish councils that rarely, if ever, make use of their services.  My local association is, effectively, a single person and, for a variety of reasons, he has been unavailable to us for a large part of the past year.

I have heard stories of groups of parishes sharing a single membership to reduce the cost, unofficially, of course, or clerks who cover a number of parishes rotating a membership between them over a period of years.  This is more relevant in the case of one-off advice than attending training courses etc.

Answer 2

County associations are a NALC sub grouping.  I suggest you have a look at the links to a NALC publication and to the number of NALC senior what I presume are paid positions it is helping to finance and decide if it represents value for money from your subscription.  https://www.nalc.gov.uk/library/publications/2556-nalc-a-prospectus-for-ultra-localism-2017/file

  https://www.nalc.gov.uk/about/team