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Trade unions

FOI reference - FOI-320
Date - 4 October 2024

Request

You have requested the following information:

  1. The details of any office accommodation your organisation provides to staff to carry out trade union business. Please include details of:
    • space measured in square feet
    • how much of this space is contained within entirely separate buildings (i.e. occupied solely by staff carrying out trade union business)
    • whether a professional valuation of the market rental value of the space has been sought either in-house or externally, and if so, what the valuation of the space was
    • any charges the council levy for office space given to trade unions.
  2. Do you deduct trade union subscriptions for any of your employees via payroll (sometimes known as the 'check off' system)? If so, do you charge a fee to the trade unions concerned for providing this service?
  3. With regard to trade union facility time, please provide the total cost of facility time from your pay bill for the financial year 2023 to 2024 and the budget for the current financial year. Please also advise the current number of employees that you fund to be union officials, measured as full time equivalents (FTE)? (For guidance on definitions please refer to the Government's Transparency Code for local government).
  4. Please advise any estimates for other costs met for those staff on trade union facility time apart from salaries - including travel expenses, office supplies, telephone expenses and energy bills.

Response

I confirm that we hold some of the information you have requested. Please see our responses below.

  1. We do not provide office accommodation to staff to carry out trade union business.
  2. Yes, we do. However, we only process check-off for a small number of long-serving members of staff. TPR appears to have stopped check-off for new joiners from some point after February 2013. No, we don’t charge a fee.
  3. We do not have figures for the 2023 to 2024 financial year. However, the union duties time recorded for the quarter July to September 2024 totalled 1297 minutes (i.e. 21.62 hours). Please note that this figure isn’t necessary accurate as it relies on relevant staff self-reporting via the new system. Payroll costs for those hours (using relevant plain-time rates and then adding on-costs for employer National Insurance and pension contributions) would equate to £844.98 in total for the quarter, and those hours equate to 0.04679 FTE (i.e. 21.62 hours divided by 66 working days in the quarter and 7 hours per day).
  4. We don’t pay any expenses through payroll in respect of union duties.

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