Bursar’s Report

BY LESLEY THOMPSON

Iwrote last year about the constancy of change in the College - little did I know just how radically change would affect all our lives this year, wherever we are in the world, as the COVID pandemic has brought challenges to us all. From the College perspective, it has been wonderful to see how our dedicated staff teams in every area have quickly adapted to the new circumstances and are continuing to work, for the benefit of our students, with such dedication to carry out their roles, whether in College or working from home.

As is to be expected, the pandemic has had an impact upon the financial position of the College. In March, the University and colleges agreed to encourage students to return home wherever possible and informed students that all tuition and assessment in Easter term would be delivered virtually by digital means. There was subsequent agreement across the collegiate University that students would not be charged rent for Easter term. This led to a loss of income for the College of about £400k. Unfortunately, as we rent some of the accommodation that we provide, we still had to pay rent to the landlords; fortunately, we were able to agree deferrals of payments until our cashflow was stronger. In addition to this, the College lost some conference income in 2019/20. However, as our financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June, a much larger loss of income will occur in 2020/21 (estimated £600k) as most of the conference activity usually takes place from July to September. Although the College’s investment portfolio fell by about 18% in March it had already rebounded by June to nearer its value at the end of the previous year. Two positive factors in the College weathering these financial challenges have been (i) the Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, allowing us to retain all of our permanent staff; and (ii) intercollegiate support in the form of the Colleges’ Fund whereby the better endowed colleges support the lesser endowed colleges. Usually, grants from this Fund are required to be added to the endowments of the recipient colleges, but this year approval was given for them to be used to cover operational expenditure. Overall, these factors helped the College to manage this difficult period. Despite these uncertainties and challenges, we have pressed ahead with our ambitious development plans, not least as we believe that these will support the College’s long term financial sustainability. During the year, we have undertaken detailed financial modelling, incorporating the impact of COVID, to support our plans. We were pleased that the University has agreed in principle to offer the College a long term loan of around £15m in support of our developments, particularly our planned new building on site which will provide new student accommodation and a café for the whole College community. Environmental sustainability is also important in all our activities and this new building will be built to the Passivhaus standard. We hope that the new building will be open in time for the start of the academic year in 2022.

Our commitment to seeing through our development plans whilst at the same time also seeking to ensure that the College is providing as safe an environment as possible for its students and staff in light of COVID is financially challenging. We are expecting that a similar relaxation of the rules to allow the Colleges’ Fund grant to be used operationally will again help to smooth the path in 2020/21 but we are also all the more grateful to all who so generously support the College in whatever way – every donation makes a real difference. If you wish to know more about the College finances I am very happy to answer questions and the accounts, including the Trustees Annual Report, are available on the College website: www.lucy-cav.cam.ac.uk/about-us/reports-accounts/