SHARP Statement for Membership

At Norwich Crown Court on Thursday 15th August 2024, Pamela Bent pleaded guilty to all charges. The amount stolen from SHARP's account between 2019 and 2023 was over £112,000. During the same period Pamela paid some money back into SHARP's accounts, meaning our net loss was approximately £61,000. On Monday 14th October 2024, Pamela was given a 2 year suspended sentence for her crimes and demanded to repay us the outstanding amount in the next year. We have not yet had time to digest the results from the sentencing but our initial feelings are of relief and gratitude that the money will be returned to the charity.

SHARP trustees and committee are all deeply shocked and saddened that someone within the charity would abuse a position of trust. We are working on an incident report for the membership which will provide more details about the case, our investigation, and will highlight the ways we as a charity have improved our systems to ensure this does not happen again. This will be released as soon as possible.

The charity commission have been kept informed throughout the case and have been content that the trustees are managing the situation. As we mentioned at our AGM the Trustees and committee have now strengthened SHARP's old financial systems, but more significantly we have also put new policies and procedures in place to ensure this never happens again. The accounts have now been fully examined by an external independent accountant who was recommended for his work with charity groups.

Despite the shorter season and tighter budget in 2024, we had a very successful season. The excavations this year led to several exciting discoveries on our malting site. In our new car park trench we unexpectedly found a post-medieval trackway, as well as evidence for a prehistoric burial. All these discoveries will be discussed in blogs so keep an eye out for these coming soon. This year we also continued to provide outreach for school visits, various group tours, a successful archaeology festival, and we have made huge progress with work on our archives and post-excavation programmes. We also had a very successful AGM for our members at the end of July and many commented that we have returned SHARP to how it used to be!

Finally, we would like to thank all the volunteers and the wider community who have been so supportive of SHARP at this difficult time. A special thanks go to the season team (who are all unpaid volunteers) who have worked very hard to ensure that the impact was reduced for those volunteers attending and fitting in a full six weeks’ worth of activities into only four weeks. Oh, and let’s not forget the catering team, who work in often hot conditions to provide us with amazing food each day!

We are continuing to look to the future and have plans in place to become more sustainable and greener. As such we have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help us match fund for a project that will allow us to buy our own solar power system and toilet block nearer to the campsite. Please do take a look and donate if you can.