Q.  To what extent has the EBU’s new proposal followed the actions of other Countries?

A.  The EBU was fortunate in gaining the co-operation of several countries, which have moved to “Universal” membership.  They very kindly shared their experience and informed us of where they now stand after the transition.

Of course, direct comparisons are quite difficult to provide due to the variety of financial schemes and the variations in the services which are offered.  However, in general the countries have financially some combination of an annual subscription and a table charge (the latter being analogous to the proposed P2P fee).  In addition, some countries only permit membership of the national organisation by way of a club.

The information made available to us is shown in a separate table which can be found by clicking here (please note that, in order to facilitate matters and enable you to view it at the same time as this page, it will open in a new window). 

However, in an attempt to make the financial comparison as similar as possible to the EBU’s new proposal, any annual subscription has been converted (on the basis that an individual plays 100 times per annum, i.e. twice a week) into a notional P2P value and added to any actual P2P fee levied in that country.  The result of that arithmetic is shown in the “Equivalent Pay to Play Fee” (the rightmost) column.

These countries also told us that the cost to introduce their scheme was of the order of £170,000.

As mentioned above, not all countries offer the same services and accordingly do not have the same levels of expenditure per member.  For example, France’s “Le Bridgeur” (equivalent to English Bridge) is produced commercially and individuals have to subscribe to it separately (12 issues per annum costing about £44).  This does result in only a section of the membership taking a subscription to the French magazine, thus making it a less effective communication mechanism.

Although the EBU’s proposal is based on the best practice of the successful European National Bridge Organisations, it has been decided not to use any form of annual subscription in order to save the cost of its collection.  For this reason an annual mailing becomes necessary to maintain the accuracy and currency of the EBU’s records in order to ensure that the free services (e.g. English Bridge and the diary) are only provided to current members.