Stuart Fox, director of finance at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), has been with the charity for the past four years and during this period the charity has undergone a significant financial transformation. In 2016/17 it reported a significant operating loss of £12.6m, having made losses in previous years too. But by 2017/18, the charity had delivered a surplus of £6.3m. In the 2018/19 accounts a surplus of £3.8m will be recorded, Fox says.

“We were generating quite significant losses, and we couldn’t continue that way,” he says. “We were getting to a more challenging place in terms of reserves and cashflow and we needed to turn that around. We needed to face some quite difficult decisions, and we did so.”