LABOUR
By Sean Purcell
There were plenty of announcements at the Labour Conference that were designed to hit the headlines – big number, big promises and the sort of ambitious plans that can be neatly packaged in to a clip for the news and social media. However, for me one of the most important announcements was the least glamorous and one that flew under the radar for many: the Union Learning Fund is making a comeback.
I get why it isn’t sexy. For many people outside the trade union movement, I suspect that there isn’t a lot of excitement for a learning fund. Even within the union movement, there are other issues that often attract more attention such as pay, employment rights, and the continuing pressure on public services.
It is sexy to me. The decision to restore the fund, with £15 million per year of government funding, deserves more attention than it had received to date. The fund tells us something about how the government views the role of the trad unions, what a modern industrial strategy should look like, and most critically, how we prepare people for economic change rather than simply leaving them to be buffeted by the prevailing wind.
For those who don’t know much about it, the original Union Learning Fund was established by Labour in 1998 with the straightforward idea that unions had strong relationships with millions of people in workplaces up and down the country who had often struggled with formal education, and therefore it was a good idea to utilise those relationships to help workers back into learning. Union Learning Representatives (ULR) could talk to their colleagues, identify what they needed and help them access training, whether this was basic skills or a higher-level qualification.
What made it work was the fact that the local ULR was more trusted as a peer than the employer who was often viewed with distrust in the process.
The data spoke for itself. The previous scheme generated around 180,000 learning opportunities for per and independent studies found that 68% of those who began without a previous qualification gained one. Four in five said that they had developed skills they could transfer to another job, and 62% said the skills they acquired made them better at the job that they had. Employers benefitted too: more than three quarters of them reported a positive effect in their workplaces.
The restored fund will have £15 million annually and workers will not have to be trade union members to benefit from it, and this is a vital point because there will be those who see the announcement and dismiss it as money being pumped by the government to their union mates, which misunderstand what the money was for, and what it did.
I am a teacher as well as a trade unionist, and one thing I have learnt is that you very quickly realise that ability and confidence are not the same thing. In workplaces up and down the country, there are intelligent and capable people who would never dream of signing up for a course, but somebody they know says: why don’t you give this a go? That could be a colleague, a union rep, or the ULR, but suddenly in that conversation they feel that it is accessible and possible.
This is where unions can do something that colleges, training providers and government departments struggle to do: build trust.
Unions exist inside workplaces, the reps know the staff as they work alongside them every day, they know who is struggling, who is finding keeping up with technology challenging, and who is embarrassed to admit that their skills are lacking. That human relationship matters intensely, and even more so now the nature of work is changing enormously.
The most interesting part of the announcement was not that the fund was simply being restored, but what the Government wanted the fund to do. It will explicitly help workers navigate and adapt to changes in technology including artificial intelligence. This is crucial as it would have been a mistake to simply restore the fund exactly as it was before – that would be an exercise in nostalgia and would miss a trick.
We are going to spend the next decade arguing about what work should be: jobs will change substantially; tasks that once took hours will take minutes; professions will have to decide what can be automated and what needs to remain uniquely human. This debate often assumes that workers need to either embrace change or fight against it – I argue that there is a third way: workers can shape change.
Shaping change will require the workplace to have skills, confidence and importantly, a collective voice at work – this where the restoration of the fund comes in and helps to shape the conversation about the future of trade unionism itself.
Unions will rightly always defend members, negotiate pay and conditions, and represent individuals who are treated poorly, but trade unionism cannot be just about what happens when something goes wrong – it is also about helping people to take control of their working lives.
There is also a wider but simple economic argument here: Britain needs to invest in the skills of people already at work. The previous fund showed that workplace learning can benefit workers, employers and the Exchequer, with independent analysis estimating a long-term return of £12.87 for every £1 invested. The new fund will obviously need to be judged on its own results, but the case for deploying the fund once more is strong.
There is also something about this that appeals to me as a social democrat. Government does not have to do everything itself, nor should we simply leave people to the market. Trade unions already have relationships with millions of workers and the Union Learning Fund recognises that those relationships can be used to deliver something positive. Government provides the investment, unions provide the reach and trust, employers benefit from better-skilled staff and, most importantly, workers get opportunities that they might otherwise have missed.
In the coming weeks I will be arguing for how we modernise trade unionism to ensure it meets the needs of members, business and wider society, and this announcement is therefore welcome to me. Unions will always need to defend members, bargain collectively and stand up to employers when necessary, but we should be ambitious about what else they can do. Helping somebody gain a qualification, develop new skills or become more confident about their future is effective trade unionism too.
That matters even more as AI begins to change the workplace. Someone who has done the same job for twenty years should not simply be told that the world has moved on. Workers need the opportunity to move with it and, where possible, have a say in where it moves.
I appreciate that £15 million will not solve Britain’s skills problem, and the new fund will need to prove that it can deliver the results its predecessor did. If it does, I hope the Government will be ambitious enough to expand it and see it is a vital avenue to upskilling our workforce.
The Union Learning Fund wasn’t the biggest announcement at Labour Conference and it certainly wasn’t the sexiest (for some), but it was one of my favourites. Behind it is a simple principle that I think Labour and the trade union movement should talk about much more: economic change should not simply happen to working people. Workers should have the skills, confidence and collective voice to help shape it.
That is why bringing the Union Learning Fund back matters and I am excited to see it return.
Who wrote this?
