GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

talked over the course of the last day or so about new ideas and innovation and

making unions more attractive to people and it has just struck me that when the

Probation Service was in the throes of being privatised I had a conversation

with Chris Grayling, one of the few conversations I had with him, not around the

table, he would never meet with us formally, but when he actually turned up at

a criminal justice conference and he actually spent about half an hour chatting

trying to be nice to everybody. He said, “Well, I’m surprised that you people

(NAPO) have not put together a bid for these contracts that I’m going to set

up”. I said, “Well, Minister, actually your legislation prevents us from doing so”.

“Oh!”, he said. “Oh well, jolly good, bye”. (Laughter) You get it. What did

happen in that process is that there was an attempt to create mutuals in the

concept that our sister here has been talking about to encourage groups of

workers to set up their own probation company. There was only one that

actually kind of made it through that process and, to be honest, it is not really a

pucca mutual, there is still a large company supporting it.

Anyway, the concept being this, that increasingly we are going to see some of

these contracts, we think, start to fail and we have got to look at what the

alternatives are in the same way as you have been talking about the music co-

operatives and the alternative of being on the dole, being out of work, then

maybe the GFTU might have a role again with our brothers and sisters in the

academic world to actually talk about how we could offer advice and how we

could train younger workers to take that sort of approach in the future. So we

obviously support it, I think the concept is fantastic and could we consider

extending it and creating some opportunities for people to get on board. Thank

you. (Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: Doug has just reminded me that Cilla Ross was due to attend the

conference but is poorly. She is from the Co-operative College. We are

actually having some discussions with the Co-operative College about exactly

that kind of thing. That obviously was not a speech in favour of the motion.

Motion 10 was CARRIED unanimously

THE PRESIDENT: That moves us on to Motion 7 in the name of the Bakers Union.

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