Conference on Community Wealth Building. 8 February 2018. Preston

I am due to speak at this seminar about work done in promoting more creative and sustainable use of local government pension funds in the session "Leveraging Local Finance"

"Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Andrew Gwynne MP, and Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell MP, will host this conference for activists, academics and Labour councillors.

In a series of sessions, we will explore how to use levers such as procurement, insourcing, setting up local banks, and energy generation to revitalise local economies and strengthen economic democracy. It will be a great opportunity to learn from each other about how we can boost our local economies to overcome austerity and transform the lives of those who are suffering every day because of the policies of the current Conservative Government. 

Speakers include: Ted Howard - Social entrepreneur, author and Executive Director of The Democracy Collaborative. Hilary Wainwright - Editor of Red Pepper magazine, Aditya Chakraborrty - Senior economics commentator for the Guardian. 

Cllr Matthew Brown - Preston City Council, Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Inclusion and Policy Initiatives. 

Location – Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP"

trade unions and transforming public services

This was the afternoon session on Day 2 of the UNISON Leadership school. The theme was on public service reform and how we should be responding to the challenge and securing the future. The speakers were Hilary Wainwright Research Director, New Politics Programme and Kenny Bell Deputy Regional Convenor Northern Region.

We discussed how UNISON Newcastle City branch successfully fought off an attempt to privatise Council services by their “Our City is Not for Sale” campaign. I saw Kenny and his branch give a presentation on this to UNISON conference earlier this year. We now made an attempt to explore the issues more closely and in depth.

Hilary has even helped write a book on the subject “Public Service Reform...But not as we know it”. The sub title of the book is “How Democracy can transform public services”. I briefly met her at a Labour Party Red Pepper fringe this year where she spoke about the topic. I did take notes but this is yet another post I have never quite got around to blogging. The book itself is staring at me from the book shelf with a pile of worthy others similarly unread. I will post a review as soon as I can.

The campaign itself could be seen as a model for other branches to follow when faced with the threat of outsourcing of public services especially in commissioning and procurement. The campaign itself had three strands - Industrial, Political and Public. The branch organised itself from top to bottom. There were regular meetings and consultation with all members and stewards. Everyone knew what was happening, what they needed to do and what was being done and why. The core principals were no compulsory redundancies and no outsourcing. Hilary argued that democratically provided public services are inherently better than those provided by the private sector. Industrial democracy is also key to providing quality public services.

The key leadership principal that I picked up (Kenny made it clear that he thought it was all done collectively but I think he is being modest) that public servants are also consumers of public services. We all want high quality and efficient services. We are not luddites and realise that you cannot argue forever for the status quo. However we believe in public services being provided by publicly accountable organisations. Newcastle City branch by campaigning, lobbying, involving the public, researching and taking well organised industrial action - they were able to defeat the proposed outsourcing.

Afterwards we broke into work groups to discuss how far we can use this Newcastle model in our branches and regions. Then we did more Group project work and in the evening there was a film on the Enron fraud.