Personal report of UNISON National Executive Council 10th February 2021

A minute silence was held for members who had recently passed away.  

A number of NEC members (including me) raised concern at the start of the meeting re: the very late receipt of the majority of the papers for this meeting, some 18 hours before the scheduled start time. Especially given important decisions to be made on the national conference 2021 and Branch resources review (BRR) although the latter was not discussed due to the meeting overrunning. 

Agenda item 1 revolved around cancelling 2021 National Delegates Conference (NDC) and replacing it with a “special” Conference on a remote as opposed as physical basis.

John Jones, NEC member for the Water, Environment & Transport (WET) Service Group raised concerns about WET Conference being proposed to be held on the Wednesday of the week before the special Conference. WET conference is usually held on a Sunday as the majority of WET Activists receive little or no facility time for such events.

The report was contentious and after two hours of discussion the following decisions were made.

That a virtual National Delegates Conference would take place – unanimous decision.

 

That the following was agreed: “The NEC identify priority themes and invite all branches and other submitting bodies of the union to submit motions on these themes. Motions would either be prioritised or incorporated into thematic composites that would be debated and voted on at conference. The SOC would be responsible for the prioritisation and compositing.” I voted against on the basis that it did not give sufficient consideration to allowing branches, regions, SOGs and service groups the opportunity to suggest what the themes should be. I also had concerns about how the SOC would handle prioritisation. The vote was 29 -19.

That the themes should be Branch Resource Review, the COVID pandemic and how we build back from it to create a fairer society. I opposed this on the basis that I felt we could accommodate more themes, that the Climate Emergency should be one of them and that branches, regions, SOGs and service groups should have the opportunity to contribute before the themes were determined.

That the NDC should take place over three days for no longer than three hours per day. I opposed this and instead supported a proposal from Karen Reissmann (which was only rejected with the chair’s deciding vote) to have an NDC for four hours over four days. The vote was 26 – 26.

That discussions would take place with service groups and SOGs about their conferences, and that Health Conference would be put back from April and a date agreed with the Health SGE. This was unanimous.

WET Service Group Conference (and Energy) to be held remotely but to be discussed with the Service Groups regarding the best way to hold either around the special Conference or later in the year.

New General Secretary, Christina McAnea was welcomed in her new role and gave her first General Secretary’s report in a rushed manner due to the meeting seriously overrunning. Christina focussed principally on our work on social care, the pay freeze and support for activists who were feeling the effects of working through the pandemic.

Delegates came in to congratulate her on her election and there was a positive response to her comments on support for activists, with a number of delegates bravely sharing just how difficult they had found the last twelve months. Critical comments were also made though about the perceived lack of intention to develop disputes, as well as Christina’s recent comments on BBC Women’s Hour about other unions and the invitation for Jeremy Hunt to share a platform with her at a recent social care event.

In her response, Christina thanked those who had shared difficult stories. Agreed that poorer countries as well as the UK should have equal access to vaccines, a subject the Prime Minister has been written to on by UNISON.

There remains a disproportionate effect on the Black community and on those who live in areas of social deprivation. Mental health support needs to be given to Activists who are in the front line of dealing with COVID.

Furthermore the reduced hours of UNISON Direct was criticised when they are currently likely to be most needed out of “normal” office hours.

Regarding finance, it was noted that subscription income as at 31/12/20 was £171.7m, £6.4m higher than in 2019.

Net income for the NEC is £120.2m, £4,2m ahead of budget.

Net operating expenditure is £113.1m which is £4.7m under budget thus the overall results are ahead of budget by £8.9m.

The net result is a surplus of £7.1m for the year compared to a budgeted deficit of £1.8m.

General reserves are increased by £7.1m to £173.3m supported by fixed assets and investments of £114.2m, cash of £56.8m and other net assets of £2.3m.

We were due to discuss motions to NDC, but as a result of the time taken on the previous discussions and the decision to pursue the agreed themes and timings, it was decided by the President to look at an additional meeting within the next three weeks to consider those matters.

Further reports were noted, with the exception of the Disciplinary Report, on which there were a number of questions. Questions were asked about Mental Health and wellbeing support to activists who had been suspended for very long periods by the union where the process of investigation had not started yet.

Personal report of UNISON Development and Organisation sub committee of UNISON NEC 13th January 2021

Concern was expressed regarding the late receipt of the papers for this subcommittee.

2 subcommittee members currently have COVID so we sent our best wishes.

Report on branches currently under regional supervision - questions on why a branch was brought into Regional supervision and in other cases of how long investigations were taking. 

Though recruitment activities had been impacted by COVID the overall recruitment figure was that 179,858 members had joined in 2020. 

An NEC member reported that in their branch an online branch meeting had been called the day before schools had been due to go back and 100 had attended. 5 new reps had been recruited. There had been a surge in membership.

There was a Branch Resources Review presentation. An NEC member asked how much of this could be shared currently or is there an alternative document to report back to Regional Council for example.

Under Learning and Organsising report:

1690 Activists attended other training last year with risk assessments, disability discrimination & campaigning with social media particularly popular.

The Open University (OU) and Worker’s Educational Association (WEA) as UNISON partners were able to adapt and deliver courses such as mental health & wellbeing and associated areas.

Almost 3000 members have now been allocated a skills academy account.

It was asked on anti-racism training the NEC took a view on this some months ago. Had we tried to set up anti racism courses. It was stated we had Hope not hate training. 

Improvements continue to be made to the RMS system under the banner of the “Merlin” company.

The next step is to modify existing weekly leaver reports.

Report on Young Workers month, research mapping and survey - UNISON’s  Young Worker’s month in November 2020 arranged a variety of activities including a survey, Health & Safety updates and an event centred around what they need post COVID. An NEC member stated that young members as well as workplace campaigns could be engaged with Black Lives Matter or environmental campaigns. An NEC member stated that the Young members officer - a lot of branches act like this is the only role available.

We noted the latest GDPR report which had a total in 2020 of 175 subject access requests (SARS).

2 Draft D&O motions for 2021 National Delegate Conference were agreed.

Rule amendments were approved for forwarding to full NEC, changing language in the existing rule book to non-gender specific in place of the current he/she, him/her etc. North West NEC members were happy to support this.

An Honorary life membership was agreed.

Personal report of Development & Organisation sub committee of UNISON NEC 7th December 2020 and UNISON National Executive Council 10th December 2020

There was a special 1 item agenda D&O subcommittee of the NEC (7th December 2020) which went through in detail the procedures for the NEC elections of 2021-2023 which were subsequently ratified by the 10th December 2020 NEC meeting.

D&O:

I took the view that the procedures from both the last NEC and SGE elections were too restrictive on campaigning and did not encourage greater member participation. I raised on D&O that there was a difference with the General Secretary election 2020 where candidates could online submit their candidacy and this was then communicated to the wider union. With these procedures a candidate could receive dozens of nominations but then be told they were not eligible at the end of the nomination period. Branches with members in more than one service group can nominate for all service groups in which they have members. Only members of that Service Group can decide on the nomination and should be consulted. This should then be ratified by the Branch. If not no nomination is made. There was some discussion around accessibility and using only online means for submitting candidate details and branch nominations. A Hybrid system was proposed so that branches used the online portal only but candidates could use an email system or the portal. It was stated this would be a problem and add to the timetable. A vote was taken 9 to 7 to just use the online portal. I was one of the 7.  It was noted that the nomination period was longer than the voting period. 

NEC

The above election procedures were approved after discussion again covering some of the points above. The vote was 27 for, 9 against, 6 abstaining. I abstained as bound by collective responsibility as a member of D&O.

Subscription income was budgeted at £166.5m for 2021, 3.5m up on this year’s.

Branch funding and allocation is forecast to be £50.2 m, up from this year’s by 3.2m.

A cautionary note that due to the pandemic, results and forecasts are likely to alter.

A brief written branch resources review progress was received with full details being given to the subcommittees in January with a view to the next full NEC receiving the final draft together with a hoped for motion to 2021 Conference.

A detailed UNISON response to the Government’s ridiculous and disgraceful public sector pay freeze was received - John Jones, Water, Environment and Transport NEC member raised that the Combined Authorities and Environment Agency wouldn’t be forgotten in a joint Service Group approach of opposition.

Dave Prentis’s final General Secretary’s report covered many issues including unsurprisingly the pandemic and Brexit. It was stated members were exhausted, were worrying about their health and the economic disaster after COVID. It was in the DNA of the Tory party to attack the public sector. Work would be co-ordinated through the Service Group Liaison committee of UNISON and the TUC in opposition to the pay freeze - at some point this may lead to lawful Industrial Action. All unions were saying we needed to build up a campaign. An NEC member said we should demand more from the Labour leadership. There was also the attacks on the Local Government pension scheme and the exit cap for public service workers.

Concern was once again rightly raised about the intention to close the Union Learning Fund before next Easter.

Encouragingly, UNISON now has some 66000 Young Members in membership.

We needed to raise the profile on climate change again as we run into COP26 (Annual UN Climate conference) in November 2021 in Glasgow.

Solidarity messages were agreed to a number of disputes: Addaction in Wigan, Heartlands Porters in Birmingham, Interserve in Carlisle, Sandwell, Woodchurch school on the Wirral, Salford Coucil ICT.

For those that have visited the London UNISON Centre, the 9^th floor conference room is to be named after Dave Prentis in recognition of his contribution to the union over 47 years. This was 1 of several tributes paid during the meeting.

A very relevant point was made by a fellow NEC member regarding the continuing promotion in UNISON publications of online gambling.

Personal report of UNISON NEC sub committee Development and Organisation 18th November 2020

A shorter meeting than anticipated as we were supposed to be approving the NEC election procedures for 2021/2023 for submission to the full NEC of 10/12/20.

However, the replacement (same) body for the electoral reform society (ERS), - CES advised that the timescales were insufficient and they wouldn’t approve as they stood so we now have a 1 item D&O meeting on this subject in advance of the NEC.

Under the learning and organising report we noted that current branch Activists currently totals 15283.

Accessible online training for H&S Reps during the pandemic has now totalled 30 new Reps with further courses scheduled now and in January.

Recruitment and Organisation - there were big numbers after lockdown but the figures had levelled out. 

Under the RMS report it was noted that Merlin had been approved as the organisation to update the current system.

An update report was received on the UNISON CaseWeb system which generated a fair few questions including why this should be mandatory for all but mainly small branches where there was an annual cost associated. It was stated that to make this free would cost £700,000. An NEC member stated that if this system was mandatory it should be free.

Further concerns were raised regarding being unable to transfer information from existing systems to the new. A decision would be taken later whether we approve or not.

The data protection update contained concerns that it’s not always possible to fully comply with Subject Access Requests (SARs).

John Jones, NEC member Water, Environment and Transport outlined a case he was dealing with as a North West England based branch when the SAR was a member in the North East Scotland contact centre where there was only 1 Rep who is on long term sick leave and the employer was not Trade Union friendly.

An update report was given on the government’s plans to cease the Union Learning Fund as of 31/03/21.

Branches under Regional Supervision - there was 1 in the North West.  

A number of Honorary Life memberships were approved including Dave Prentis, General Secretary and Bernie Gallagher former NEC member of many years from the North West.

Under AOB - an NEC member from North West raised concerns that the Black members conference was not being held as a decision making conference. It was essential that we used every opportunity to maintain lay democracy throughout this period.

Personal report of UNISON National Executive Council 7th October 2020

The Presidential team was to continue for the whole of the second year of office to June next year 2021. This was agreed but no notice given to us of this proposal. 

Conferences - Looking at virtual decision making conferences for next year in case in-person conferences is not possible. Will not be exact replica, format will need to be different, but will be decision making body. We would need to engage with the relevant Service Group Executive. Health was the first conference cancelled this year and there is no desire to cancel two years in a row. No notice given to us of this proposal.  AGM (Annual General Meeting) - Need to provide clarity to branches, want them to run branch AGMs virtually if in person not possible and looking to facilitate this, Looking to reduce lead in from 12 weeks to 8 weeks. All work in progress, no absolute proposals. We do want accountability and lay democracy. 42 for 1 against. No notice was given to us of this proposal.  Wales Region NEC members had been mandated to suggest all AGMs should be postponed in 2021 and this was lost at NEC with almost everyone else against (Traditionally some Wales branches have wanted 2 yearly AGMs and seem to be using Covid to push that agenda) This type of rule amendment has appeared at several recent Conferences and been hammered every time so a nice try I suppose to introduce by the back door. There was a strong feeling that lay democracy for Service groups, Regions, National and branches must go ahead as much as possible and national must facilitate this. One branch said they have practised by having open meeting for all members every week and at first this was hard but then has got easier and makes branch accountable to members.  Obituaries. Including Raph Parkinson, Regional Organiser in the North West who was also previously an NEC member from the North West.  Dave Prentis,  General Secretary report. ‘Sad re staff member Raph who has died and will offer support to people in North West. Proud of staff and activists during pandemic – at times of uncertainty, and risk.  Members – courage and dedication. As Union we need to be with them. March closed down in 1 day and moved to home working to make sure staff were safe. All going the extra mile. “General  Secretary elections are always destabilising, but this time attacks are made on the union, by complainers, detractors, telling us what we are doing wrong, all the bad things UNISON is doing. No organisation is perfect, we are always trying to improve, to do better,  that’s what a union with a future does, Concerned in way people have trashed our union and staff and it has had an effect on staff morale. Impression given that nothing is happening in UNISON. Some challenge to this in discussion. The excellent Haringey carers victory was rightly mentioned and congratulated upon. 143k new members have joined UNISON to date this year, the most in memory giving a total overall of 32k taking into account leavers. UNISON Welfare through There For You has so far spent 1m during the pandemic assisting members and their families in need. It was reported that the Government had this very morning announced their intention to do away with the excellent Unionlearn fund from 31/03/20 which has been excellent for members who have never before had learning opportunities. Organisation. Have recruited more members but not more activists to support and organise them. Government just announced end of Union Learning Fund. Discussion – Value to fighting actively and organising protests and strikes to mobilise activists, lack of coordination across sectors, or across unions, made worse when seeing Frances O’Grady standing beside Rishi Sunak when he decimated furlough scheme.  Local government – massive attacks now on Pension, huge job losses/redundancies expected, pay.  Internal Rule I Unison disciplinaries. Question asked about the length of delays in getting these resolved. Many over 12 months, most others still at investigation 10 months after investigation started.  Chair of Development and Organisation sub committee said that hearings have been delayed due to lack of availability of NEC members during Covid . But that investigations have gone ahead by phone or online and are not delayed , and that no timelines or estimates of completion of investigation can be given as they are complex and multi-faceted.

Regarding finance, subscription income of £101m is £4.8m ahead of budget and is £3.7m higher than the corresponding 7 month period last year.

Net income for the NEC is £70.8m which is £2.2m ahead of budget.

Net operating expenditure of £67.5m is £1.2m under budget thus overall results are ahead of budget by £3.4m.

The net result is a surplus of £3.3m compared to a budgeted deficit of £0.1m.

General reserves are increased by £3.3m to £169.4m supported by fixed assets and investments of £115.6m, cash of £48.2m and other net assets of £5.6m.

 

Personal report of the UNISON National Executive Council 16th September 2020

In line with UNISON guidance, this 1 item agenda meeting to nominate the General Secretary was scheduled for 90 minutes but took 140 minutes without breaks bringing in to question, discrimination to those who have disability issues not to mention those who had a back to back meeting and consequently missed most of it.

Concern was expressed at the outset that no hustings were allowed at this meeting particularly as it was needed to be held remotely. Chair said no hustings on basis NEC members will know who they will vote for before the meeting. This I believe was unfair to 1 candidate who is neither an NEC member or Assistant General Secretary so who would not be known to most on the NEC. IT issues took a while to sort out.

4 of 5 candidates were proposed and seconded.

An NEC member supporting Christina Mcanea proposed an elimination ballot. A left NEC member challenged this saying it was unprecedented to propose this during the course of a meeting and should have been communicated beforehand. We were one hour 35 minutes into the meeting at this point already overrunning. The vote was 34 to 22 for an elimination ballot. I voted against.

A Roger McKenzie supporter proposed a secret ballot. A left NEC member said any delay in the meeting was due to those who introduced proposals that could have been raised in advance of the meeting - No curve balls.

The secret vote vote was For 27 Against 29. I voted against.

Subsequent rounds of the elimination ballot were: 1st round Christina Mcanea 22, Paul Holmes 22 Roger McKenzie 12, Hugo Pierre 4.

2nd: C.Mcanea 23, P.Holmes 25, RMcKenzie 11.

3rd: Christina Mcanea 29, Paul Holmes 26. 5 abstentions.

Christina Mcanea was nominated by the NEC.

Roger McKenzie supporters either abstained or voted Christina Mcanea on the final round.

Personal report of the UNISON NEC Development and Organisation sub committee September 2020

The meeting lasted about 50 minutes. We were asked to raise the hand up flag on Teams if we wished to speak. There was some discussion about us making sure we avoided having a democratic deficit under  current conditions - about whether we needed more frequent, shorter meetings versus having them longer with more breaks. It was unlikely there would be any physical meetings this side of the New Year. No conclusion was drawn. The Chair of D&O would take this up with the Presidential team. 

Online Stewards and Health and Safety Reps courses are being run in Regions generally via local colleges.

495 Stewards have been trained to date this year compared to 1139 in the same period last year.

108 Health & Safety Reps have been trained in the same period compared to 238 last time round.

21 Union Learner Reps have been trained compared to 67 last year.

182 Reps have achieved ERA accreditation versus 486 in 2019 to date.

368 have undertaken advanced skills training compared to 630 in the previous year to date.

569 members have undertaken other training this year generally around Covid 19.

1381 members have done some form of learning compared to 1840 last year to date.

2399 members have done skills academy training this year.

RMS/WARMS update - We were reducing dependence on paper. Using email was projected to save £100,000. It was stated that the process of collecting arrears from members had changed. More members had been retained in membership with consequently more subs collected. 

It was agreed new activists are required to complete a GDPR (General Data Protection regulations) e-note within 3 months. Support would be given. 

An NEC member asked if branches in Regional supervision be allowed to make nominations for NEC/General Secretary.

The Chair thought yes. An officer said yes depending on the type of supervision. The Region might supervise the meeting. 

The procedures for the NEC (National Executive Council) elections 2021 would be discussed at the next meeting.