The Labour government’s summer internship scheme is blocking the children of full-time trade union officials. A rare policy win from Labour…
Government now restricts the scheme to working class individuals. This is defined by their parent’s profession when the applicant was aged 14, using ONS and Social Mobility Commission classifications…
Parliamentary questions pursued by Tory parliamentarians have clarified what technical class a “trade union official who works for a local authority under 100% facility time” is: “Under the simplified National Statistics Socio-economic classification (NS-SEC) framework, this occupation is classified as analytic class 3: Intermediate occupations.” Unless they’ve worked out a loophole…
This means, for example, that Rayner’s son, Ryan (now 28) couldn’t take advantage of the scheme. When he was 14 Rayner was a Stockport Council trade union pilgrim. Tory shadow Cabinet Office minister Mike Wood said: “What an embarrassing own goal. Labour’s incompetence knows no bounds: they can’t even wage a class war properly.” Quick Andy – do something….
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…
Former Treasury minister and adviser to Burnham in the Makerfield campaign Lord Jim O’Neill, who has turned down a role in his government, said Burnham’s first statement Commons was:
“The last thing investors wanted to hear… gilt yields have risen by a 0.25% in one day, which is a lot. We’ve not had that since Liz Truss days… If your country is under the focus of ‘can they come up with a sensible fiscal strategy’ on a day when the markets think ‘well no, you’re not showing any sign of it’ you’re going to have a tough day…if it stays like this your mortgage rate is going up.”