Annual General Meeting
Thank you to our members who voted in our Annual General Meeting, which took place on Tuesday 21 July 2026. This year 5898 members voted, with all resolutions duly passed and the election and re-election of all directors approved. You can see the voting results below.
The votes cast for and against the resolutions were as follows:
| No. | Resolution | Votes For | Votes Against | Votes Withheld | % For |
| 1. | To receive the Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2026. | 5,855 | 14 | 28 | 99.72% |
| 2. | To approve the Report on Directors’ Remuneration. | 5,722 | 129 | 46 | 97.02% |
| 3. | To approve the re-appointment of Deloitte LLP as Auditors of the Society. | 5,815 | 48 | 34 | 98.59% |
| 4a. | To re-elect Jacqueline Arnold. | 5,808 | 58 | 32 | 98.47% |
| 4b. | To re-elect Anna Barsby. | 5,800 | 60 | 38 | 98.34% |
| 4c. | To re-elect Victoria Jane Bruce. | 5,809 | 51 | 38 | 98.49% |
| 4d. | To re-elect Richard Bryan Ellison. | 5,816 | 44 | 38 | 98.61% |
| 4e. | To re-elect Kelli McKechnie Fairbrother. | 5,798 | 61 | 39 | 98.3% |
| 4f. | To re-elect Hamish Cameron Galbraith Marr | 5,792 | 63 | 43 | 98.2% |
| 4g. | To re-elect Richard James Pike. | 5,788 | 71 | 39 | 98.13% |
| 4h. | To re-elect Mark John Stanger. | 5,819 | 41 | 38 | 98.66% |
| 5. | To elect Stuart Miller. | 5,824 | 39 | 34 | 98.75% |
All resolutions were duly passed: Ordinary Resolutions 1-5, receiving over 50% of the votes cast in favour. A vote withheld is not a vote in law and is not counted in the calculation of the proportion of the votes for and against the resolution.
Pledge for Votes: Donation to Charity
The Cumberland committed to donate £2 for every vote cast to Calderwood House. The total raised from voting was £11,796, which The Cumberland have decided to top up, to make a total donation of £15,000 to Calderwood House.
AGM Q&A
The appointment of Stuart Miller as Chief Executive was made after a thorough and rigorous recruitment process led by the Board. As part of the recruitment process, Stuart met with all members of the Executive Team as well as the Board. This enabled both Stuart and the Society to assess his suitability for the role alongside the fact that he had over 30 years of experience in Building Societies and Banks including many in senior leadership.
Following his appointment, there was a structured handover period over two months before the formal transfer of responsibilities occurred. This provided Stuart with the opportunity to gain a detailed understanding of the organisation, its operations and stakeholders. Once he formally took over responsibility as CEO, it is standard practice in organisations like ours, for the CEO to also be appointed to the Board as an Executive Director, reflecting their responsibility for leading the Society and contributing to its governance.
Although our new Chief Executive, Stuart, joins us from outside Cumbria, he was appointed on the strength of his leadership experience, values, commitment to mutuality. We are confident that he will continue to build a strong understanding of the communities we serve while leading the Society in the best interests of our members.
In 2025 the Society entered a 12-year contract with Tata Consultancy Service who we will work with over the next few years to design, build and deliver a modern banking platform. This significant investment will provide the Society with a modern banking infrastructure which will include improvements to our mobile app and internet banking which will allow all our members to manage their savings and mortgages online as well as enhanced capabilities including transaction processing times.
Sustainability is an important part of our long-term strategy, and we have already taken significant steps to reduce our environmental impact, with the goal to become operationally carbon neutral by 2030.
Our commitment and approach have been recognised by our successful achievement of B Corp status with a score higher than any other building society.
We monitor the risk posed by climate change and are developing our understanding of how this affects our customers, colleagues, communities and supply chain. We do all this in line with recommendations by The Financial Stability Board’s Task Force, as well as balancing this with our understanding of our heartland and local area.
We also believe that our lending is environmentally responsible. We only lend funds to help other customers buy their own homes, support UK-based Hospitality and Tourism or finance small businesses within our core operating area. You can read more about our approach in the sustainability section of our Annual Report and Accounts.
Our support for Time to Change West Cumbria reflects The Cumberland’s commitment to investing in the communities we serve. Through its work at Calderwood House, the charity provides vital accommodation and support for people experiencing homelessness and other complex challenges across West Cumbria.
The £2 donation will help Time to Change continue delivering practical, frontline support to some of the region’s most vulnerable people. As a customer-owned mutual, we believe supporting local organisations that create lasting social impact is an important part of our purpose, helping to build stronger, more resilient communities.
We are proud to support communities across our entire heartland, including Cumbria, Southwest Scotland and Northumberland.
Many of the charities we support operate within specific local communities, so our funding naturally reflects local needs and the organisations working in those areas. At the same time, we are committed to ensuring our community investment benefits the people and places served by all of our branches.
Our colleagues in South Scotland work closely with local charities, community groups and good causes and our work with FareShare, our headline charity partnership over the last 3 years included FareShare, our headline charity partnership over the last 3 years included FareShare and the West of Scotland which covers our Scottish operating areas. We continue to support a wide range or initiatives across the region. As a customer-owner mutual, our aim is to make a positive difference wherever our customers live and work, and we remain committed to investing in communities on both sides of the border.
We’ve made a deliberate decision to remain at the heart of the communities we serve.
Before making that commitment, we listened to customers, residents and businesses through our Community Conversations programme. The message was clear: people value having a trusted financial institution on their high street and want us to stay.
That reflects our research, which found that more than a quarter of people across our region see high street decline as one of the biggest issues facing their communities. Today, we have 31 branches and are the only remaining financial institution in 19 of those communities.
That’s why we’re investing in our branch network. We’re modernising branches to ensure they continue to provide accessible, face-to-face banking alongside our digital services.
As a mutual we’re here for the long term. We believe banking is about more than transactions, it’s about supporting people, businesses and communities to thrive. That’s why we’re choosing to invest in our branches, not withdraw from them.
The Board are conscious that there is a delicate balance in Cumbria between the benefits to the economy brought by tourism which includes jobs, and significant expenditure in our communities and Cumbrians being able to afford homes in their local area and periodically conducts reviews to ensure that the Society’s approach remains appropriate. In our last such review it identified that holiday let visitors invested more in the local tourism economy than other visitors to our operating area. It’s also interesting to note the well-publicised sharp rise in unemployment and closure of businesses in places such as Padstow where restrictive measures were put in place – this has led to local people having to travel much longer distances to find work. Unfortunately, there is no fully right answer that will satisfy all points of view.
Additionally, the Society has several products to help people get on the property ladder including those aimed at first time buyers as well as shared ownership schemes and our long-term commitment to thriving communities includes our physical present and significant in area employment.
Contactless payments do require you to enter your PIN as a security measure from time to time when you are making consecutive contactless payments. This helps verify that it’s you and keeps your card secure. Once the chip and PIN transaction is complete, you’ll then be able to use your card to make contactless payments.
Alternatively, to avoid entering your PIN from time to time for contactless payments, you can register your card for ApplePay or GooglePay. These services use your device authentication (such as Face ID or Passcode) and removes the need for that occasional PIN when making contactless payments.
The way in which a credit card operates is a little different from our existing services and would require systems and operational capabilities that we don’t have today. It isn’t something we have ruled out of offering in the future, and we do revisit this from time to time, but our current priority is improving capability around our existing products and services.
Helping people onto the property ladder is a key part of our purpose as a building society. We offer a range of mortgage options, including up to 95% loan-to-value mortgages, as well as First Home Saver accounts to help customers build their deposit. We also support affordable home ownership through schemes such as Shared Ownership and other government-backed initiatives.
Just as importantly, we provide personal support throughout the home-buying journey. Whether that’s in one of our branches or over the phone, our colleagues take the time to understanding each customer’s circumstances, explain their options clearly and help them make informed decisions. We also offer guidance on protecting their home and financial wellbeing through products such as home insurance and critical illness cover.
Our aim is to make buying a first home as accessible and straightforward as possible, while supporting customers every step of the way.
We understand that our members want the best possible return on their savings, and it’s natural to compare rates across the market.
The interest rates we offer are determined by a number of factors, including market conditions such as the Bank of England base rate, delivering fair value to our members, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of the Society.
While we may not always offer the very highest rate, we remain competitive. As a mutual, we have a responsibility to balance the interests of both our savers and our borrowers, taking a long-term approach rather than focusing solely on short-term pricing.
This approach helps us maintain the Society’s financial strength, continue supporting home ownership through responsible lending, and invest in improving the services we provide. It also enables us to deliver important strategic investments, including our New Cumberland programme, while protecting the long-term interests of the Society and its members.
Our aim is to deliver lasting value throughout competitive rates, excellent service and a strong, sustainable building society that continues to serve its communities for generations to come.
Changes to regulatory requirements, particularly around identity verification and anti-money laundering, significantly increased the obligations involved in opening new charity accounts. As a result, we took the decision to pause opening new charity accounts while we review how we can meet these requirements in a way that is both robust and sustainable. We're actively exploring our options at present and will keep this under review as we develop our longer-term approach to this group of customers as part of New Cumberland. We know how important local charities and community organisations are to the areas we serve, and we're keen to support them wherever we can. While we're unable to offer new charity accounts at the moment, we hope to be able to share further updates as our review progresses.
As a Board a key focus for us is returning value back to members.
We can only understand what members value by speaking and listening to our members. Customer insight is invaluable to us, we listen, learn and improve from the feedback we receive daily, whether this is obtained through our 1-2-1 interactions, Feefo reviews, App store reviews, customer surveys or complaints.
To really strengthen and deepen our understanding on key themes, we have recently embarked on a once in a generation initiative, Community Conversations. As a Society, we have spent time in four different key locations within our operating area, hearing from our members and the community on what matters to them.
We also recently held our Board Day in Barrow where we were able to spend time with key local stakeholders to really understand more about the community we serve and what the needs of the people in the area are from us as an organisation.
We know that members value our branches, we hear and see that every day through member feedback. And we know that they value the service they receive from our people in those branches. We will continue to protect and invest in those things going forwards.
We have several ways in which we measure value, including our customer satisfaction scores, the number of customers coming into our branches, and those members that choose to stay with us year, on year. As we learn more about what you our members value, we will develop additional measures to monitor our impact. Going forwards, increasing the value our members see will continue to be a key part of our strategy.
The direct impacts on our operations are limited. However, the indirect impacts are significant as we operate within the wider UK economy. Here the impact of the war is being felt in rising oil prices (which impact the cost of energy and the costs of all the products that use it). As covered in our outlook section of the ARA this is likely to lead to a slowing, pausing or even reversal of the downward trajectory of UK base rates. This is likely to keep mortgage pricing firm and also provide some support for savers as predicted rate falls will take some time to come through.
While we don’t comment on politics or express a view instability in government and politics and policy choices can impact financial markets and interest rates – as we have directly and quite recently experienced when we saw changes of this nature in the last Conservative government.
Our focus remains on supporting our customers and communities, maintaining a strong and resilient balance sheet, and making prudent, long-term decisions. As a customer-owned mutual, we are well positioned to respond to changing conditions while continuing to provide the personal service and financial support our members value.
We do not make decisions based on short-term political or geopolitical events, but we remain vigilant, adaptable and committed to acting in the best interests of our members whatever the external environment.
The right to vote at a building society’s AGM is governed by the Building Societies Act and the Society’s rules. In the case of a joint account, both individuals may be joint account holders, but the voting rights attached to that account are exercised by the first-named account holder. This approach ensures that each qualifying account carries a single vote to avoid effectively giving one account two votes. This helps ensure that members holding the same type of qualifying account are treated consistently and that no individual account has greater influence over the Society’s governance than another.
One of our strategic priorities is to safeguard our business for the future. As part of this, we are investing in a new banking platform to ensure that The Cumberland can continue to thrive for years to come. To enable delivery of the New Cumberland programme we have reviewed the products and services that we currently offer and unfortunately, we can no longer support International Payments due to the complexity and cost of UK anti-money laundering regulations in this area, the small number of our members who use this service and in order to avoid undue complexity within our new digital platform.
We understand that this will impact some of our members however there are other providers of International Payments in the UK which must adhere to the same UK payments regulations as The Cumberland. These providers will also be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and therefore you will have the same safeguards that you do now.
We are a regional building society and one of the few building societies that offers a full range of accounts including current accounts and internet banking. However due to our size, capability and resource, we are currently unable to offer full internet banking for customers who only hold savings or mortgage accounts with us, this will be addressed by our transformation once it is safely live.
We are currently investing in the future capability of The Cumberland and whilst we are unable to provide specific timelines or information, we appreciate and value the feedback we receive from customers.