Labour has now fully dismantled the reporting process for trade union facility time in government departments. The pilgrims can proliferate without the hassle of public scrutiny…
Facility time is paid time off for union staff working in the public sector. It has long been abused by union stooges – the Employment Rights Act removed a requirement imposed in 2016 for departments to report on how much facility time was being taken, and its cost…
The Cabinet Office has now dismantled reporting requirements. Ministers said yesterday in a Parliamentary answer:
“The team whose responsibilities previously included amongst other duties, collecting, collating and publishing public sector facility time data sits within a wider Civil Service Reward and Employment division. This division has existed for a number of years. The removal of the requirement for public sector organisations to report their facility time data to Cabinet Office has resulted in these specific responsibilities no longer forming part of this team’s remit.”
In Labour’s impact assessment the removal of the requirement was framed as a deregulatory benefit: “We assumed that it would take 8 hours of an HR officer to compile the information for the Cabinet Office each year, at an hourly labour cost of £18.23. This gives an estimated cost saving from reduced data collection of 2293 x 8 x 18.23 = £334,000.” Doesn’t sound like any staff will actually be removed from the reporting team – good luck making those savings…
The cost of trade union facility time is up 115% in NHS England under Labour, according to quietly released government figures. That’s paid time off for trade union representatives in the quango to carry out their union duties. Just last week, thousands of junior doctors went on strike for five whole days…
In the year 2023-24, 71 full-time equivalent NHE staff were given time off to do union work, costing the taxpayer £89,974. In 2024-25, that number jumped to 88 pen-pushers, costing the taxpayer £193,550. Enough to hire six nurses…
Meanwhile, the quango that Streeting ‘abolished’ back in March still hasn’t opened a voluntary redundancy scheme, and staffing costs have actually increased since it was ‘axed’. Taxpayers starting to lose patients with these pilgrims…
As junior doctors finish their five-day strike today, nurses reject the government’s “grotesque” 3.6% pay rise, Guido can reveal hundreds of health service staff are working for their trade unions instead of doing their actual jobs. Under arcane rules from the Employment Protection Act of 1975…
According to research by the Taxpayers’ Alliance seen by Guido, in the year 2023/24, 168 NHS Trusts had more than 49 taxpayer-funded union representatives each using ‘facility time’ – paid time off granted to trade union reps in the NHS to carry out their union duties. The total cost of facility time came to £17.1 million. There will be other trusts with fewer than 49 paid reps taking time off to do union work – these don’t even have to be recorded according to the current rules…
A staggering 212 NHS workers spent 100% of their ‘working hours’ doing union work. Another 128 union reps spent between 51-99% of their time on union duties, and a further 2,586 worked on their union duties for at least 1%-50% of their hours. All on the public purse…
Lucy Powell on LBC, asked by Tom Swarbrick for her reaction to Labour MP Samantha Niblett’s call for a ‘summer of sex’ debate in Parliament: “I personally don’t own any sex toys, but each to their own… I’m not really sure that’s the right place for it, no.”