In September the 10 top-flight clubs reached a new agreement with the RFU in which funding of £33m a year will be split between them, and a promotion play-off being played between the bottom side in the Premiership and the Championship champions.
But there is yet to be any agreement on funding for the second tier, with Pettipher saying that before Covid-19 their RFU money helped cover about a third of the Pirates’ budget.
The Penzance-based club are currently looking for new investment after long-time benefactor Dicky Evans ceased his funding as the Pirates ended plans for a new stadium in Truro.
Pettipher says the leadership at the RFU is too focused on the elite end of the game, to the detriment of the sport as a whole.
“It’s not exclusively a remit to win England matches and fill Twickenham, but that is the remit that is working at Twickenham – a little binary planet system around that,” she said before presenting a copy of a letter the club is sending to the RFU to the their local MP at Westminster.
“The legal structure of the RFU is a union of member clubs across England, and the argument is by creating more money here you support the game.
“That’s fine except the money is going backwards and forwards between an ivory tower elite of Premiership clubs, England teams and then Twickenham. When is it coming out to the rest of the pyramid?”
Pettipher added: “Imagine this is an environmental argument and we’ve decided we are only going to protect the big beasts.
“We know that if the coral dies, if the bees die, if the trees die, we know in our ecosystem that you need all of this to feed the big beasts.
“But that does not appear to be in the leadership thinking of the union, which is responsible to government to govern its sport.
“We are simply one club – we have our own very specific difficulties that better governing decisions and better leadership decisions could rectify tomorrow.
“I’m asking government to put substantial scrutiny and pressure on their governing body to better govern their game.”
