GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

to give a slot on the financial advice, please come and ask us. We are very

happy to do that. We do it for Unite regularly and some of the other trade

unions.

Our most popular thing that we do is a general financial planning surgery on

work sites where every member can have half an hour with a financial adviser,

so they can pitch up. They like it. It is what their document might be that they

want to take and show the financial adviser. We do the invites for you, we ask

the reps to send out the invites to the members and the members reply to us.

We collate the responses. We make it as easy and seamless and professional

as we can for you and your reps and your members, because what we do not

want is precious reps’ time being allocated on what they do not need to do, so

we are a backup. Everything you need will be in here . Please do contact us.

Thank you for your time. Thank you. (Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: Can I ask if anybody wants to make any contributions or make

any comments around this shared services model that we have been

developing over the last couple of years? It is quite an exciting project. We are

undertaking quite a lot of activity for some of our constituent affiliates on a kind

of agency basis, if you like, and the objective here, and Ian made a rather good

point about this not being about mergers through the back door, that is certainly

true, but in a sense what we are actually about doing is seeking to provide a

structure that enables small specialist unions to remain independent by giving

them the facilities that they would not be able to develop on their own so that

they can continue as an independent organisation and that is a very significant

part of the strategy here.

Moving on on the same theme, we are about to launch a new legal services

arrangement under this general umbrella and I would like to ask Doug just

briefly to introduce that part of this shared services model.

LAUNCH OF NEW LEGAL SERVICES

THE GENERAL SECRETARY: When we had the summit in 2015 when we first

started to look at the ways of cooperating and sharing services, there was quite

83