Conspiracy and power grab are probably the wrong words. For the ordinary member who does a bit of shooting at their club it doesn't really make any difference, except that they could choose to pay later than they ordinarily would and save a few pounds. If you're involved in club admin though then AGB have, to put it mildly, complicated your life. If everyone's membership begins on the 1st October it's easy to manage, but if they start expiring at different times of the year then club officials will find it harder and harder to keep track of who is insured and who is not. In a perfect world the member would know that they have to renew and will keep on top of it, but anyone who has managed the renewal process will know that they have to be chased and reminded an awful lot because they are only human and forget things. It's bad enough doing this in September alone, but now I'm facing a situation where I may have to do this constantly, because as the years pass fewer and fewer people will start their membership on 1st October.
I would disagree that AGB are guilty of just not thinking this through. Remember this is not a new idea that they've just thought of, it was proposed in 2012 and again in 2015. They want the membership system to run this way, and during those years they got shouted at a lot by me and plenty of others who made it clear that the plan was insane and would not work. So now they have imposed it. The only conclusion to draw that I can see is that they know that it will cause chaos, they just don't care. They'll have their money and that's all that's important.
As for a power grab, well I suppose it sort of is but it's a very ham fisted one. They're trying to subvert a bit of the membership process by contacting lapsed members and inviting them to rejoin a club that they have left and not reapplied to in any other way. Our constitution, and I suspect almost everyone elses too as they're likely all based on the AGB template, says that members have to apply to join us and we vote on them at the next general meeting. But we can just refuse anyone who they propose, so this probably is AGB just not thinking something through, because if they did they would know that the secretary does not have the authority to accept someone's application without asking anyone else.