EC Meeting March 2017

6

Implementation

(5)

The GFTU calls for:

a.

The new Children’s Minister demanding that all plans for the marketization and privatisation of children’s services are stopped.

b.

All unions with an interest in children’s services to work together to campaign in the public and parliament against this threat to ensure that resources continue to be directed at providing good public services for children and families on a “not for profit” basis.

(6) This biennial Conference is appalled the Government proposed wholesale privatisation of Children’s Services. Decisions about vulnerable children, including removing them from their families, are some of the most difficult and sensitive that child protection professionals have to make. (7) Conference believes establishing a market in child protection would create perverse incentives for private companies to either take more children into care or leave too many living within dangerous families. (8) Napo is already witnessing the chaos, confusion and increased risks arising from Government efforts to privatise a huge part of the Probation Service despite the work/staff being awarded the gold standard for service provision. The Government repeated the same argument about private companies providing children’s services to “encourage innovation and improve outcomes for children”. (9) Whilst pre-election considerations and immediate campaigning by Napo and others in the sector contributed to these plans being put on hold for now, the GFTU and affiliates must be vigilant and ready if they re-emerge post an election. (1) This conference condemns police surveillance of journalists, trade unionists and activists, noting the growing evidence of such unacceptable activity that appears to have reached unprecedented levels. (2) Conference notes the revelations that the Metropolitan Police used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers legislation (RIPA) to secretly access a journalist’s phone records, internal emails and other sensitive data as a means of exposing sources and whistleblowers, without judicial oversight. Further investigations found that many other police forces have also exploited RIPA to spy on journalists and identify their sources – breaching a key tenet of journalistic freedom and the NUJ’s Code of Conduct, the responsibility to protect one’s sources. (4) It is in that context that increasing numbers of journalists and activists have been secretly placed on a police database of so-called “domestic extremists”. Six NUJ members are currently involved in collective legal action to challenge their inclusion on the database, which details intimate details about their lives, including their work, medical history and even their sexuality. (5) This conference condemns the lack of action on the part of government to tackle these outrages, and calls on the GFTU to campaign against such outrageous use of surveillance, to call for the restrictions of RIPA and similar pieces of legislation; and as part of that campaign to encourage activists in the movement to carry out subject access requests under the Data Protection Act to expose the extent of state surveillance and support union’s taking legal challenges. (3) Such methods have also been used against trade unionists and activists as a tool to criminalise dissent and prevent scrutiny of the powerful. Resolution 10 Surveillance of Journalists

The GFTU immediately joined in with those campaigning against the new proposals planned by the government and existing restrictions and behaviours.