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The UK’s largest public sector union has criticised an anti-tax-rises pressure group for wasting a million-plus pounds of public money.
UNISON claimed that the right-leaning TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), which describes itself as an independent grassroots campaign for lower taxes, demanded answers from public bodies to spurious Freedom of Information requests that will have cost taxpayers at least one million pounds.
The union – an organisation with 1.3 million members – expressed its opprobrium following a line of questioning by the TPA on union facility time to 1,200 public organisations.
UNISON moved to strengthen its stance by citing 2007 research from the then Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), which suggested that, rather than costing taxpayers’ money, trade union involvement has a positive impact on the workplace.
Effective and engaged union representation saves the public purse between £170 million and £400 million a year by improving retention, training take-up, health and safety, and dispute resolution, according to the BERR, and as much as £3.6 billion is saved through general productivity gains.
The general secretary of UNISON, Dave Prentis, said, ‘Taxpayers expect their money to be spent providing services, not answering spurious questions from the TPA to prop up its own political interests... Trade union facility time makes good business sense. The TPA’s questions make no sense.’
TPA director Matthew Sinclair defended his organisation and its latest scrutiny of trade unions’ funding.
‘By financing their other work, like representing and recruiting members, taxpayers' money frees up union funds for political contributions and expensive campaigns,’ he said.
‘If big, rich, public sector unions are going to take an active political role, there is no way they should be getting taxpayers' money.’
