All quiet on the £1 Bowler Levy front

Bowling News

It has all gone quiet on the BCGBA £1 Levy per bowler introduced this year. I haven't heard of any club in the Huddersfield area that has been invoiced for, and paid, the new annual levy charge.

The Yorkshire CCGBA publicised deadline of payment by the end of April appears to have gone unnoticed. The BCGBA declared that all such charges would be collected by the County organisations and forwarded to the BCGBA by the end of May. Again no notice of any such targets being met. Yorkshire contacted all clubs and said that invoices would be produced and forwarded to clubs by 15 April.

I asked Yorkshire CCGBA for an update and have received no response to that at all which is not surprising as previous attempts to get information about this levy from Yorkshire have all gone unanswered going back to before last Christmas.

It seems to me that the whole process has been badly managed. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the levy being introduced in the first place. Examples of this abound. Yorkshire is the only county charged with collecting this levy that decided to base that charge on the 2025 membership records whereas all the other counties decided to base it on the 2024 club membership numbers.

In addition the Yorkshire model relies on clubs passing information on to the Chief Executive, Officer who then updates each club's records himself. The model of the JustGo system is that individual clubs have access to and can update their club records online. That access is denied clubs in the Huddersfield area. That may be because of the lack of a roll-out programme of the system to local clubs. There has been no published training or support programme for Huddersfield area clubs.

In March we asked clubs how much confidence they had in the JustGo system in providing the basis of invoices to be passed to all clubs by April 15th. Thirteen local clubs responded to that request. Of those 13 clubs only two indicated that they were confident that the JustGo system showed an accurate record of their membership. There were some horror stories about problems with the system and the inaccurate data on the system. I passed this information on to Yorkshire CCGBA and again there was no response.

So is any club prepared to acknowledge receipt and payment of the new levy? Let us know if your club has or has not received an invoice (club names will not be published).