Photo Credit: England and Wales Cricket Board
The appointment of Baroness Valerie Amos as an Independent Non-Executive Director of the ECB has been unanimously ratified at the Annual General Meeting today.
The ECB’s 41 members also unanimously ratified the reappointment of the other continuing directors – Ian Watmore, Alan Dickinson, Barry O’Brien, Brenda Trenowden, Jim Wood, Katie Bickerstaffe, Lucy Pearson, Martin Darlow, Ron Kalifa, Scott Smith and Tom Harrison.
Ian Watmore, ECB Chair, said: “Valerie is a true cricket fan who brings with her outstanding experience and expertise, and I’m delighted that she’s joined the Board. Her insights and challenge on leadership and inclusion will also really help us as a Game.”
Financial update
Today the ECB is also publishing its Annual Review and Financial Statements for 2020/21, covering a year of significant disruption but where cricket led the way in being the first sport to stage international team competition after the Pandemic struck.
Across the Game as a whole – including ECB and First Class Counties – revenue losses amount to more than £100m compared to what had been expected to be received in 2020 after a year of matches played behind closed doors.
Staging international cricket and taking swift action to reduce costs meant the ECB avoided the worst-case financial scenarios last year and was able to support the cricket network, although revenue was impacted by the postponement of The Hundred and staging biosecure cricket incurred significant additional costs.
The ECB’s end of year results show thatin the year ended 31 January 2021, a year when revenue had been projected to increase significantly to allow for investment in growing the game, turnover was £207m, a fall of £21m as compared to the previous year. The loss on ordinary activities before taxation was £16m in the year ended 31st January 2021, compared to a profit of £6.5m in the prior year.
With the aim of protecting cricket’s financial sustainability, the ECB took early and decisive action to reduce costs, including stopping some planned investment, staff furlough and pay reductions from April to October, and through a redundancy programme removing posts from the organisation which saw the number of employees on the ECB payroll at the end of January 2021 reduced to 331 from 389 a year earlier. As a result, the ECB was able to provide emergency assistance to the cricket network while avoiding the worst-case impact on our final year-end position.
Last year was also the first year of the new County Partnership Agreement (CPA), with distributions to the cricket network and stakeholders at the highest levels seen in ECB’s history.
Scott Smith, Chief Financial Officer of the ECB, said: “This has been a challenging year, but by being able to stage international cricket and by taking decisive action early in the Pandemic, we have been able to support the network and avoid a far worse financial scenario. There remains considerable uncertainty over the year ahead, but we hope that delivering another full summer of cricket – and with crowds beginning to return from next week – we are able to protect the revenue we need to invest in growing our game.”
The Annual Review is available here
The Financial Statements are available here
