It was a pleasure to speak at Cooperative UK's Practitioners Forum last month, and to update colleagues on the latest from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) mutuals team and their post-pandemic response. You can see a helpful write up from Coop News here, but in brief, the important changes are:

- the FCA confirmed in November that for accounts due on or before 31 October 2021, they will take no action if those accounts are less than three months late. If your accounts are due after that, you need to be filing on time (though we think you might find the FCA relatively sympathetic);

- from 13 December 2021 onwards, statutory declarations will again be needed where normally required with a submission to the FCA (they had suspended that requirement previously);

- with the permissions around virtual meetings having ended, it will now depend on what the rules of an individual society say as to whether you can conduct meetings electronically going forward. The FCA made it clear that they now expect societies to be complying with their rules, so if your practice doesn't match your rules you need to change one of them!

We have found that many organisations are planning to continue to use a mixture of online and in-person meetings going forward, so now is the time to update your rules and make sure that they allow you to do this. Do get in touch if you would like help with that process.