Finance speech to NDC 2022: Dan Sartin

The speech given by UNISON’s Chair of Finance & Resources Management Committee, Dan Sartin, which was well-received by Conference on the Tuesday morning.

Conference, my name is Dan Sartin. I chair the NEC’s Finance and Resource Management Committee. We call that Committee FRMC so I may use FRMC as shorthand to mean our Finance Committee.

I’ve been Chair of FRMC since July 2021. I’m a Branch Secretary of a large branch, West Sussex, here in the South East. I know what it is like to do the job you do for UNISON and your members. I understand the pressures you face in your branches.

I am delighted to be here today to present to you UNISON’s annual accounts for 2021.

Conference, I don’t intend to go through the detail of all the numbers in the report, you’ll be relieved to hear. I know you will have read it cover to cover already! I will give you a few pieces of financial information though. The overall message from our year-end accounts is that our Finances in our union are robust and in good shape.

Last year our subscription income from members was £174.9 million, which was £4.1 million higher than that received in 2020. This was due to an increase in membership, driven by Covid-related anxiety in workplaces. I am sure you saw those new members in your branches, as you would have been supporting them no doubt and organising them where you could.

And – at the same time as our income increased last year – the union’s national and regional expenditure came in significantly under budget, and branches too were spending significantly less than usual, due to the continuation of the pandemic.

So, Conference, in 2021, our General Fund Reserves increased by £22.2 million to £259.4 million. The overall surplus of £22.2 million breaks down as follows: the NEC surplus was £12 million, Branches’ collective surplus was £8.7 million and the Regions’ was £1.5 million. Those are big numbers Conference, and they provide us with opportunities.

As lay members, we need to think about how we should use that financial health and security to build our union, to change it and to make us stronger, so we can serve our core purpose better: to win more for our members delivering public services. And I want to report back on how we are starting to lay the foundations of the kind of union we all want us to be.

I also want to talk about some of the financial challenges facing us as a union, because they are serious and must be planned for.

Starting with the achievements of 2021, as you heard from Andrea, the new NEC – through its Industrial Action Committee – moved quickly to increase strike pay from £25 a day to £50, and payable from day one. It was the Finance Committee that had to approve that recommendation, and we were delighted to do that. We want our members to feel able to afford to take strike action when they need to do it, especially our low-paid members. Conference, we took a quick decision on strike pay, and the Industrial Action Committee has other plans in train to transform our processes for industrial action and the support available to branches and activists who find themselves in dispute.

Conference, we are in the fight of our lives. RPI inflation is at 11%. Our members are feeling the pinch as never before. The cost-of-living crisis is real and a fundamental challenge to our union. I can tell you that our NEC is focussed on the Cost-of-Living Crisis and how we lay the foundations now for an effective union that can beat it. And we want your support to do that.

The NEC believes we need to significantly increase our national Industrial Action Fund in a sustainable and measured way, for the long-term. The national fund currently stands at £21 million. To be a union that fights its weight, as the UK’s largest union, we need a national Industrial Action Fund that reflects our size and ambition.

The union has grown its national reserves, substantially, and therefore should be able to make a substantial contribution to our Industrial Action Fund, so when we need the funds they are there, and employers and this government know they are there.

But the national office is never the whole part of the UNISON story of course. Generally, branches too have been accumulating substantial surpluses now for some time. But this was particularly obvious in the last 2 years when branches added £20 million to Reserves in just 2 years: 2020 and 2021 alone. In total, branch Reserves now stand at a £67.1 million. That’s also a lot of money Conference.

Conference, UNISON is not a business. UNISON is not an insurance service. We don’t exist to put our members’ subs in the bank to sit there and accumulate interest at historically low rates of interest. Nor would our members want their hard-earned subs tied up, dormant and useless.

We are this country’s largest trade union, with so much potential, and as such we need a strong Industrial Action Fund, and we need a new partnership between the centre and the branches to achieve this.

Conference, next year I want our Finance Committee to work closely with our Industrial Action Committee to bring back proposals to you in 2023 for how we will grow our national Industrial Action Fund together. Common sense proposals you will find acceptable in branches and will want to support.

Conference, in 2021 we as a new Finance Committee have also tried to get a stronger grip of governance and oversight of the union’s finances.

Conference, I am delighted to report that last year your Finance Committee took steps to make it impossible for UNISON to continue to provide advertising space for gambling companies. Your Finance Committee understands the harm that gambling does in society. I know you share these concerns.

Conference, the NEC wants to change the culture in our union. We want lay members to be in the driving seat. That’s where they should be in a member-led union.

We are also looking at who UNISON contracts with. Last year there was quite rightly a controversy over the Liverpool Conference Centre hosting an Arms Fair. Quite disgraceful. UNISON has tightened its procurement policy and will give them no new business until we know Liverpool Conference Centre will stop working with arms dealers.

We also took steps in November 2021 to reject a request to spend £8 million of members’ subs on a leasehold for rented office accommodation for a regional office. As a committee we have asked officers to investigate whether we can make better use of the existing office accommodation we already own, much of which is first class and deserves to be fully utilised. We must invest our members subs in strengthening the trade union we devote our lives to, not in renting offices we don’t necessarily need.

FRMC has been trying since August 2021 to secure transparency on the union’s expenditure on paid facility time release for NEC members. One of the reasons we want to see this is so we can ensure it’s allocated in line with UNISON principles on equality. We are still working with officers to resolve this. We are determined to find a solution that allows senior elected lay members to properly interrogate financial data.

We face challenges as I said at the outset, so what kind of union we are will determine how we meet those challenges, and whether or not we can succeed.

Conference, we aren’t sustaining the recruitment we saw at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. We have no need to panic. It is probably true – and you will know this as well as me coming from your branches – that a good part of that influx of new members was looking to us as an insurance service if they needed us in the pandemic, and now are judging that they can afford to cancel their subs.

The NEC believes that building our union’s strength for the long-term will mean a fundamental shift from the servicing model to the organising model. We do need to think in new ways about our union.

In 2021 the FRMC oversaw the development of the Branch Support & Organising Fund (or BSOF). The BSOF aims to get more and different resources closer to branches and is boosted with 2% of members’ subscription income (as opposed to 0.5% in the old Regional Pools).

Branches that do not feel they are in a position to employ their own staff can still bid for projects, which would then be implemented at a local level by staff employed by the national union.

Conference, this is an opportunity for a quantum shift in how we organise members, retain members, win for them and then recruit new members. In that order. Not recruitment first, with no plan on how we will support them. I hope your branch is already thinking about what projects you want to run or be involved with. BSOF must be member-led, in terms of its governance for awarding funding and project management.

On FRMC we will monitor, evaluate and review progress made under the new fund. There will be a need for the best projects, which prove they can make major gains for members, to be rolled out wherever possible as quickly as possible. FRMC is committed to keeping the resources provided to BSOF under review. Should 2% prove insufficient, because we are finding a winning formula for organising, we will find more. This NEC will have a relentless focus on organising.

This is the best way to turn around any temporary post-Covid loss of membership. But the Finance Team at UNISON Centre do a fantastic job for FRMC, week in week out, monitoring spending and ensuring that we can smoothly manage any impact on the budget if income drops.

Following Conference 2021, our new funding formula came into operation on January 1st.

2021 was not a typical year, as I have set out. It does remain to be seen, after a period of stabilisation and normalised branch activity, whether our new branch funding formula will provide all branches with the support they need to meet the extreme pressures they face. This is an area therefore which FRMC is committed to keep under review also.

The Finance Committee has asked Officers in January this year to develop budgeting advice for branches for better, longer-term financial planning. We expect to see this advice provided in the autumn, in time for the 2023 budgeting process, and we hope you will find that useful.

In 2021, UNISON continued to provide financial support to our brilliant welfare charity ‘There for You’. The need for There for You has never been more obvious. FRMC will continue to work with There for You’s Trustees to ensure that if we can make more support available to our most hard-pressed members this year, we will do so. FRMC has already discussed plans for a major investment in partnership with There For You. Watch out for exciting news on that shortly.

So Conference, I hope that gives you a good feel for 2021 and how we intend to continue into 2022 and beyond. We will change the union to make us stronger. Better scrutiny, more transparency. Organising not servicing. Putting our financial strength to best use.

I want to thank the Finance Committee and Diana Leach, our fantastic vice-chair, all the Finance staff at Head Office working so hard on all year round, many of whom are supporting branches directly as you know, and in particular Sotirios Loizou who is retiring this year after an amazing 48-year career of dedication to UNISON. Thank you, Sotirios, for your service. And by no means least, I want to thank all the branch Treasurers for all you do for our union and its members. Amazing job, well done!

Conference, up next you’ll hear from our President Paul Holmes. Anyone who knows Paul knows two things at least. Firstly, Paul wants to change our union, and secondly, when he tells you about it he will usually quote someone interesting. So as I am the warm-up act for Paul today, here is a quote you might like.

Albert Einstein said 'The measure of intelligence is the ability to change'. Conference, I think we need to be intelligent this week. We need to show our intelligence and show our maturity as a trade union. In the debates we have and how we have them. Our members demand it – and deserve nothing less from us.

Conference, I have pleasure in recommending to you that the Union adopts these Financial Statements for 2021, and chair I move. Thank you.