Photo by John Cairns.
TREASURER’S REPORT by Andrew Parker
I
t will be no surprise to anyone that Covd-19 was the dominant influence on our finances this year. However, careful management has enabled us to maintain a secure financial position. As expected, coronavirus had a dramatic impact on our income in 2019-20. Conference income was £1m lower than expected because Easter and early summer conferences were cancelled. Rental income was down by £0.8m because our students were not in college during Trinity Term and we released them from the obligation to pay rent. Commercial income was also down, as our tenants struggled to survive under the Covid lockdown, and endowment income also suffered. The impact of this reduced income was partially offset by the sharply reduced level of activity from Easter onwards and the government’s furlough scheme. Overall, we were able to reduce our expenditure by c. £0.8m. We also
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benefitted from the generosity of our alumni community in the form of unrestricted donations and legacies. All these factors combined to produce an operating deficit of just over £1m. However, we also saw our investments in Oxford University Endowment Management and Newton suffer a capital loss in the year of £6.6m and a downwards adjustment to the value of our commercial retail properties. Overall, net college assets reduced by £8m from £232m down to £224m. Given that in the previous year college net assets grew by just under £7m, the impact of Covid-19 is all too apparent. This level of deficit is typical of a mixed college of our size. There are some smaller colleges with smaller endowments who fared considerably worse than this, and some are having to contemplate significant corrective action, including redundancies.
