Care connect learning - when UNISON lost a lot of money…

 

Here's yet another extract from my memoirs, which are going for a song at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history.

This refers to my first (of seven) term of office on the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON from 2003 onwards and to something I learned during that term of office.

"As I have mentioned, I served on the NEC’s Education and Training Committee during my first term on the NEC from 2003 to 2005. The decision to restrict me for ten years thereafter to just one Committee, for reasons to which I will no doubt get round to reminiscing about sooner or later, was made easier by the fact that this Committee was abolished in 2005.

The Committee had been held responsible for one of the most egregious failures of governance and financial probity of which I became aware during my time on UNISON’s NEC. 

In 2001 a senior UNISON official had registered a new company “limited by guarantee”, Care Connect Learning, which was - in effect - a wholly owned subsidiary of UNISON (technically, UNISON was its only “member” when the company was established). Care Connect Learning was intended to obtain Government funding (from the Learning and Skills Council) to provide training to (particularly) lower paid and less skilled staff in health and social care.

Whilst it did not appear that any lay Committee of the Union (including the Education and Training Committee) took any decision to establish this company, various senior lay activists and officials were, at various times, appointed as Directors of the company.

Presumably the original intention had been that the company, by providing training to potential UNISON members who would thereby become well disposed towards the trade union, might assist with recruitment, whilst the ability to access Government funding would enable UNISON to offer valuable training opportunities to existing members. However, because of the way funding from the Learning and Skills Council was provided up front and the training provision only subsequently audited, the company pretty soon found itself owing a lot of money to the LSC to repay funding which had been provided but deemed not to have been used appropriately.

At this point the matter came before the Education and Training Committee - and obviously also came to the attention of the Finance Committee, as UNISON had to agree to underwrite half of the repayments due to the LSC so that the company remained a going concern. This led to an investigation by another senior UNISON official who, when she presented her report, answered my question about who had given the official who set the company up on UNISON’s behalf the authority so to do by telling me that the official had believed that he had the authority.

It cost UNISON at least a million pounds to extricate its troublesome subsidiary from its difficulties (later offloading the company before its voluntary liquidation in 2010, leaving its unsecured creditors massively out of pocket). In debates about the allocation of funding in UNISON between branches and the Centre, UNISON members should really know more about some of the occasions on which the Centre has managed to waste our members money on a truly heroic scale because of inadequate governance."