Dear Nick

I am disappointed that you have decided to leave TTE to join Paddle UK. You were appointed for a four-year term and have served for less than one year. If we take into account the timescale of the recruitment process for senior roles within sport, you must have already been looking to leave after just a few months. Not the commitment that our membership would expect and deserve.

You have not given yourself time to actually achieve anything in the role. You have talked a lot, but never got anything finished. Memoranda of Understanding with the VETTS and National Council are cans that have been kicked down the road to be picked up by somebody else.

Whilst you have attended various events to see elite performance, including the Olympic Games, you have largely  shown disregard to the membership. If you were serious to actually find out, you could have joined plenty of facebook groups. Indeed, if you had joined the VETTS site, you would have seen the Advent Calendar that I produced for our members. You would have got a flavour of what a happy membership looks like.  

What you did achieve was to get the resolutions through at the AGM on the promise that things would change in TTE. You asked the membership to trust you. We have had no return for giving away considerable rights. To use a mathematical formula, my trust in you is now tending towards zero.

I agree whole-heartedly that staff should be able to perform their duties in an atmosphere that is happy enough to be conducive to a good culture and enable good communication. Staff should not be subject to being on the receiving end of unkind, cruel, derogatory,unhelpful and, in some instances, defamatory, abusive and threatening language.  However, the staff should, in turn, treat people with the respect that they expect to receive themselves. Sadly, this has often not been the case. Your colleagues have been quick to make threats to anybody that does not agree with them  I suspect that the vast majority of the “toxicity” to which you refer is generated within TTE. I shudder to think how the senior leadership team treats the more junior members of your organisation. If it is anything like how they have treated some volunteers, then that is the most-likely source of the problems.  

The fact that you tried to push the blame back on the treatment of staff back to me was risible. You seemed to think that I could be made a scapegoat (again) for the wrongdoings within TTE. You blaming me is like blaming a weather vane for the direction of the wind, or Laura Tobin or Carol Kirkwood for the weather. As you know, I was not willing to give you any of my time to attend the meeting with you, the CEO, the legal adviser and head of personnel on my own. I was intrigued to see what you would try to say, but not enough to actually give any time to it.

Your message sadly illustrates how little you understand about Table Tennis in England.

 Let me run through some points for you. 

You try to make the differentiation between an membership association and a members’ club. Clubs often have a focus on social and recreational activities and may have a more unstructured structure, whereas associations tend to be more official organisations with an emphasis on professional, industry-related, or interest-based activities, frequently incorporating advocacy and networking efforts.

TTE should follow the lead of the VETTS. An association where the members talk about “us and we” whereas virtually everybody talks about TTE as “they”. The VETTS association is a members’ club.

The GB Table Tennis is a flawed project.

It is an empire-building vanity project dreamed up by our ex-CEO.  Although, I am flattered by how much GBTT, the Table Tennis United project and the Competition Review appear to run along similar lines to those suggested in my Forty-Two document from May 2022.

England wants to embrace GBTT as there are currently Welsh and Irish players that are ranked higher than all the English players. Thus the team is strengthened.

• This is the only time in history when England is not producing the quality of players to populate the representative team. A problem of our performance team over a number of years. Compounded by the collapse of our tournament structure.
• Our teams only compete as GB in the Olympics, once every four years.
• Scotland, Ireland and Wales do not want to lose their independence.
  • Our collecitve international voting power would reduce from 7 votes to 2.
  • We would lose the separate opportunities for players from those countries to play internationally for their country.
  • Opportunities for our own players would be reduced.

I would suggest that before trying to absorb these other associations, Table Tennis England should get a grip on running the sport in this country. Our job as the National Governing Body is to promote the game of table tennis IN ENGLAND. Thus, the membership in England has little interest in GB Table Tennis, if it is going to dilute the service that it should reasonably expect.

We owe our duties to many stakeholders, beyond the boundary of our Company Members. I am intrigued what other stakeholders you feel that we need to be catering for. Of course, you may not understand that the Company Members are the representatives of the Leagues and Counties, numbering around 250 rather than the membership that amounts to around 25,000.  If you are referring to UK Sport and Sport England, they will be presciptive about the uses of their funding. What other important stakeholders are there?

Sally Lockyer is starting at an interesting time for Table Tennis England. You should be part of her support network to settle into the role. Instead, we now have to pursue the third recruitment process for a Chair of TTE in 18 months.

I have already suggested to Sally that she fact checks anything that she is told by you or the members of staff. There are reliable sources of information but will need to be careful who she trusts.

There are so many things that your successor will need to repair. Fortunately, you have been in post too short a time to do much damage. If you were in any normal business, you would be on gardening leave for the term of your notice as the outgoing CEO should have been.   

Of course, if TTE were a normal business, it would have dealt with issues that have arisen:

• Tarnishing, if not destroying, the premier products of the brand.
• Making threats against volunteers.
• Making changes to regulations without reference to the Board and conceealed their actions.
• Disregarding the Information Commissioners’ Office rules regarding the completion of Subject Access Requests.

I will be intrigued to see what the job description for the new Chair will be. The need for it to be someone from within Table Tennis is now illustrated as a necessity. For two reasons:

• Somebody within the sport is likely to understand what needs to be repaired or set up and why.
• A person from within the sport is likely to be more committed. To stay the term of the appointment and not be looking for the bigger posting, using Table Tennis England as a stepping stone.
• There are many professional people within the membership who would be qualified to become the Chair of TTE.
• This would be preferable to table tennis in England, rather than another “career sports professional”.

The new Chair should be willing to grasp nettles. Actually addressing issues. Taking action rather than just talking about it. An effective person should be able to address quite a lot of the issues quite quickly.

It would seem that Table Tennis is not the only sport with problems. If you read the Bill Beaumont needs to get angry and whip the RFU into shape(1) by Stephen Jones from The Times. Perhaps Sport England, UK Sport and the DCMS need to review how sports are run. There is a lot of duplication of effort and therefore expense. At a time when the Government is looking to cut expenditure, this would appear to be low-hanging fruit.

Stephen Jones makes some interesting suggestions about:

• the composition of the Board
• compostion of other committees within the governance structure
• executive pay levels
• The re-direction of money used on administration to development officers going out to the public and membership. Rugby had 60 development officers at one time. Table Tennis has fewer than ten. Food for thought.

I understand that throughout your time with TTE, you remained as a Non-Executive Director with Paddle UK  This should mean that you should be familiar with Paddle UK, how it hould be run and its membership. However, the experience from the NEDs within TTE board is that they have not found out much at all about table tennis in England. They almost have it as a badge of honour that they know nothing about the sport and have no links to the membership. 

The Sport England directive of having independent directors from outside the sport has not been effective in table tennis and now appears to be mirrored in rugby. I would not be surprised if this is the same throughout sport in England. Their lack of knowledge and unwillingness to learn, renders them to be ueless to the sport.  I understand that there is some merit in bringing in people with outside experience, but this can only work if they commit to familiarising themselves with the sport and netwrking with the membership (and other stakeholders, if you insist).

How many directors in TTE have been on any Sport Governance Academy courses? I have only met one person from TTE on any of the courses that I have attended. She is no longer at TTE. I have met some quite inspiring people from other sports. As ever, meeting other attendees tends to be more beneficial than the actual course. 

UK Sport has just announced its funding for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. LA 2028 Investment Funding Awards Overview December 2024 Once again, Table Tennis is receiving funding as a dvelopment sport. It is due to receive £1,375,000 between 2025 – 2029. There are only 3 minor sports that receive lower funding.  Para TT is receiving £4,175,000 as it represents a greater posibility of medal success in 2028. Obviously, it makes sense for TTE performance to try to share some of the faciilities affordable by the ParaTT performanc program. It would be interesting to see a meaningful business plan outlining how this money is going to be spent.  I presume that has already been prepared for the funding award. Therefore, it would be good to see that to understand the plans going forward.

The main worry about this is that we hear that many things have been “signed off by the board”, when, in fact, the board has not even seen them. This has been the case throughout the cursed Competition Review. The board has not received sufficient information to make informed decisions about issues in a timely manner. 

When I was on the Board, the executive wanted to look at updating the website. We were given some information about various providers and we were guided towards one provider in particular. When we asked when the provider would be able to start the project – 6 weeks ago!

All the best for 2025.