Big interview: Kevin Williams national secretary, YMCA England

But the pace of change is now "accelerating", according to Kevin Williams, national secretary at YMCA England for the past year.

"The two mergers are more than a coincidence," explains Williams. "We have approximately 150 YMCAs that are completely autonomous from head office, so they are tuned to local needs. But because there are a lot of new regulations in areas such as child protection, housing and finance, we need to help local YMCAs facilitate the changes."

One of Williams's ambitions is to cut the 150 local centres down to 47 to match the regional divisions used by the Learning and Skills Council and Connexions, a move he thinks could bring valuable savings. "Running separate YMCAs in the same area is inefficient, so we want to have just one YMCA in each region to make things simpler," says Williams. "This helps us with issues such as recruiting chief executives. It's impossible to find 150 chief executives with the same level of experience and then train them to the standard we require."