Politics
The House | Unison’s Andrea Egan: I’m Not Rejoining Labour Until The Party Inspires Me
Andrea Egan (Photography by Tom Oldham)
11 min read
Unison general secretary Andrea Egan is nine months into the job. She talks to Sienna Rodgers about Andy Burnham’s promise to unions, why she is not a Labour member and her pledge to take a social worker’s salary.
When The House first met Andrea Egan last year, she was standing as an underdog in the race to determine who would become the next general secretary of Britain’s biggest union.
Although she had the advantage – unprecedented in Unison – of being a single challenger against an incumbent, only the flame-haired social worker herself was confident she would win. After all, she was neither a paid union official nor a Labour member; it would be the first time a lay member of Unison had been elected to lead it.
But lead the 1.3-million-member trade union she now does, after securing 60 per cent in the internal contest that attracted a typically low turnout of just seven per cent. At the time, it was another blow for No 10, which lost an ally in the defeated Christina McAnea – widely thought to be another casualty of Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity.
Egan not only defied the odds to become head of Unison but also got her wish with a new Prime Minister she favoured for the job. “I am a fan of Andy. I mean, he’s the King of the North!” as the left-winger from Bolton put it to us in November.
“He’s made a real positive start,” the trade union leader tells The House today, noting that she was “really pleased” with Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign. “The way he approached that election – he wanted to listen to what people wanted to say, and he was open and honest enough to say, ‘Look, the Labour Party’s made mistakes.’ At that time, it was really important for society to hear some honest politics.”
She has already met with the new Labour Prime Minister on several occasions amid No 10’s effort to step up engagement with unions. In meetings with Tulo (as the group of party-affiliated unions is known), she reports that “he acknowledged that the trade unions had been left aside in the previous couple of years”. There is a “much better commitment” now, “absolutely”, she says, and a “better working relationship”.
“It was reassuring when he said, ‘I’m going to put the trade unions back in the front and centre,’ because why would we not be? We represent the workers who are delivering the public services. And he’s kept good with that promise. He’s met us a number of times.”
The Unison general secretary warns that Burnham is “not exempt from criticism”, though is careful not to criticise his controversial pick of chancellor, despite having endorsed Ed Miliband before the decision was made. Did the John Healey appointment come as a disappointment?
“I won’t say I was disappointed,” she replies carefully. “I felt Ed, and it was all in my own personal view, his vision for where the country needed to go was OK, was good. But I’ve made clear internally and to Andy, it’s not really our role as trade unions to tell him who to put in his Cabinet. So, if he’s picked John Healey, he’s picked John Healey, and we’ve got to respect that. Listen, the real issue is whether they deliver or not.”
Healey became Chancellor after resigning as Starmer’s defence secretary over a lack of military spending, of course. Egan, on the other hand, backs the “Wages not weapons” campaign by some unions – passed as a motion by the TUC this year for a second time – to call for investment in public services rather than defence.
“Well, that was his previous position. He’s now Chancellor, and his budget requirement and options are much wider than just defence,” she points out.
Egan does not support any increase in defence spend, let alone a three per cent of GDP or higher target. Is she not persuaded by the threat of Russian aggression, the possibility of conflict with China, perhaps even the need to defend the Falklands at some point soon?
“What are you defending, if your own infrastructure is broken and this society is not a healthy society?” she asks in response, before adding: “When you look at recent wars, we’ve been in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen. So, is that keeping our shores safe? We’ve got to be honest about what that money is actually being spent on.”
Nor does she accept the Westminster consensus that welfare spend needs to come down.
“Well, what is welfare spending? That’s the key question,” she says. “A big chunk of that is actually pensions, and that is deferred income for people who have already put into the pot.
“Then you’ve got to be really honest and realistic that a big chunk of our trade union membership is in these low-paid, insecure jobs, in these outsourced companies, and that low pay means they need to rely on benefits to exist. So, it’s all fictitious. Like Andy says, we’ve got to start having some very honest conversations.”
Although Egan holds back from criticising Healey directly, she is happy to make clear her view of the Home Secretary, who she says has “not even answered requests for a meeting”.
Unison wants to express its concerns over the government’s proposals to increase the time migrants will have to wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain status; the standard going up from five to 10 years, rising to 15 years for those who arrived on health and social care visas.
“That was one of my disappointments – that Shabana Mahmood was left in position, simply because of her position on the migrant workers. As yet, there’s just a wall of silence at the moment.
“I think that’s absolutely unacceptable because they make these big announcements, and what they’ve got is these hundreds of thousands of workers who are just being left on a thread at the minute, wondering where their futures lie and what’s going to happen to them and their families.”
Unison, a primarily public sector union that represents more social care workers than any other, is lobbying for changes not to apply retroactively: “It was a deal – come to the country for five years, do the work, and then you get leave to remain.”
Egan also wants their visas no longer to be tied to specific employers. “It’s got to be sector-wide,” she says. “The victimisation of those workers because you’re tied to one employer – that’s where the abuse happens… There’s a fear about raising your head and reporting them because the threat is there and it is real: ‘If you speak out, we’ll report you to Home Office, we’ll sack you’.”
Her overriding argument speaks to something fundamental – and very challenging – that Burnham wants to achieve in government: the creation of a ‘national care service’. “What I have said to Andy Burnham is, ‘You’re not going to be able to deliver that without the migrant workers.’”
And was he receptive to that message? “He nodded,” she recalls. “We were in a big meeting, and he acknowledged my statement.”
Egan, who was raised by a single mum on a Bolton estate, worked in the care sector herself; in a care home at 19, then children’s residential care. A union rep, she worked her way up, becoming manager of the unit, then convenor for children’s services, and ultimately a social worker.
“I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me”
She joined the Labour Party about 16 years ago, yet was expelled in 2022 after sharing posts by Marxist group Socialist Appeal, which was proscribed under Starmer.
Asked whether she would like back in, Egan says: “I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me.
They expelled me. I’m now the leader of the biggest trade union in the country, and what I have said is, ‘You need to start behaving like a Labour Party.’”
Extraordinarily for the leader of the largest trade union, which is affiliated to the Labour Party and continues to be one of its biggest donors, she is “waiting for a number of things” before considering a fresh membership application.
“They’d have to do something that would inspire me and instil my trust again that the Labour Party can behave and deliver like the Labour Party,” she says. Has she been given assurances that she would be let in? “After four years, I can reapply anyway… So, it is a choice thing.”
In the meantime, she is allowed to attend Labour conference but not permitted entry to the main hall.
When Egan last spoke to The House, she said she would not move down to London, where Unison headquarters sits on Euston Road, if she became general secretary. That has not changed – and fortunately for her, splitting one’s time between North and South is in vogue right now.
“My husband and my son are still in Bolton. That’s my family home. But whether I need to be down in the London office, the West Midlands, Glasgow – I’ll be wherever. You only need to look at my diary. I’m all over the place.
“The same is said about how many days you work. Ideally, you’d want to be working a standard working week, wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t work out either. So, I’m just wherever I need to be.”
Egan also pledged to shun the £181,000 remuneration available to the general secretary, vowing to take only a social worker’s salary, without specifying what this figure would be. Has she been able to fulfil that pledge?
“For clarity, I’m taking a social worker’s salary, and that is within the scope of a social worker’s salary,” she replies, which suggests it may be the general average of around £40,000 but could also be much higher. She has not yet donated the remainder to Unison funds as promised; it is “sat in the account because I want to do it year-end”.
So, what will her final salary be?
“It’s a social worker’s salary,” she reiterates, unwilling to clarify. “What I will do is, I’ll publicise it at the end of the year to my membership. The only people I’m accountable to, if I’m really frank, is my membership, and you don’t say anything to your membership you’re not prepared to deliver on. So, I will deliver on that, and I will let my membership know.”
In our last interview, Egan also said she would not feel comfortable with the union representing someone like Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse who complained about having to use the same hospital dressing room as a trans colleague. “We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them,” she explained.
Has this situation arisen since she has become general secretary? “You can imagine: members come with all kinds of issues. They stole money, they’ve assaulted somebody, they’ve been accused of being racist. You don’t have to represent every single member through the rulebook because there’s some standard,” she says today.
The Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender in the Equality Act is “unworkable”, she adds, before stumbling over her words, trying to decide whether she “respects” the law as it stands.
She settles on: “You’ve got to adhere to the law. But at the same time, we absolutely will be looking at how we challenge that.”
While others favour reopening the Equality Act to change how it defines gender in light of the court ruling, Egan is not so sure. “I never said we were open to opening the Equality Act because where do you stop?” she asks. The implication is that it could open a Pandora’s box; she is deeply concerned by Reform UK’s plans to scrap the Equality Act, as well as the threat the party’s potential electoral success poses to unions.
For now, her focus is primarily on a campaign pressing the government to deliver on its manifesto promise to “bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation”.
Have the unions involved figured out how much the insourcing they proposed would cost upfront? “Work is being done, but our bottom line is really clear: it would pale into significance to what’s already been lost through the public purse.”
Egan is “loving” her new job. “I feel more optimistic than I did last year. I feel more excited than I did last year because I’m now – I mean, that was an historic win,” she says.
“I’m a working-class woman. A working-class woman from a town who has always felt that my position as a council employee, as a trade unionist, as a community member, are connected. It’s all for the good of.
“I did say this to Keir Starmer before he left: ‘Listen, I’m not an oppositionist for the sake of it, because if you win, we win, society wins.’ I think that’s where we’re at now. We’ve got one opportunity for really trying to get us back to a better place.”
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Illustration by Tracy Worrall
8 min read
Campaigning in Makerfield, Andy Burnham threatened Thames Water with public ownership – but has not so far followed through. Ben Gartside reports on a decision that will define his approach to privately owned suppliers of public goods.
What, exactly, does the word ‘control’ mean when applied to those entities that supply vital public goods?
Does it mean full nationalisation, with every decision in the hands of ministers and officials in Whitehall? Or does it rather mean that customers exercise a measure of control over their operation through ownership of a portion of equity? Or some other variant in which locally elected representatives take a golden share in the companies that serve their region?
These are not theoretical questions but are coming sharply into focus as Andy Burnham wrestles with what to do about Thames Water.
As of today, Thames Water supplies 16 million customers, owes more than £20bn and has been in breach of its licence for two years.
A large portion of the Labour Party would like to see the company – which critics say has become emblematic of the failures of utility privatisation – back in public ownership.
Its creditors, however, want to take over the company and keep it afloat by releasing tranches of cash to help the beleaguered firm.
The financiers are quietly optimistic. Industry sources suggest Burnham and the officials supporting him are pragmatic on the issue, and hope that the focus on control could reheat plans for the minister to hold a “golden share” in Thames Water, offering the government a veto while retaining private ownership of the suffering water company.
A concerted effort is being made by some in the City to understand Burnham’s policy brain. Some of Thames Water’s creditors have commissioned research into Burnham’s work on taking buses into public ownership in Greater Manchester, extrapolating out what it would mean for their financial interests.
They take heart from public comments by John Healey, the Chancellor, who insisted that ‘control’ need not mean full nationalisation.
“Some might claim that public control is public ownership,” the Chancellor told his audience, “but it’s broader than that.” What it meant instead was “local leaders and a stronger centre”, accountability for “fair bills, better services, investment that gets delivered”, and “an active state driving better regulation, quicker decisions”.
Within the Labour movement, two rival plans are circling ahead of the party’s conference.
On one side is Mainstream, the group co-founded by Compass and Open Labour. It did more than any other to get Burnham back to Westminster by criticising Keir Starmer’s economic policies from the left and encouraging bolder decision making from the government.
With an ally in No 10, the group is still singing the same tune. Mainstream supports public ownership of water generally, and believes that Thames Water should be put immediately into special administration.
Initially, Burnham struck a similar tone on water. In June, campaigning in Makerfield, Burnham told the Guardian that public ownership was “absolutely an option” and that “for Thames Water, that is what should be done”. By the end of August, the plan to put the company into special administration had gone quiet, with a Whitehall source telling the Times there was “no quick or clean solution without an enormous price tag attached”.
While Mainstream’s motion has been left open-ended for the interpretation of the new government, its motive is clear: a source close to the group says that the system now is itself an attempt at public control without public ownership, and it is not working.
Mainstream is careful to say this is not a confrontation, that it wants the government to succeed, and that the motion is deliberately open. It also does not expect to win. Under Starmer, it tried something similar on the two-child benefit cap last year, had its initial motion blocked but counted the overall shift in tone around the debate as a success.
“Copying the failed model of non-profits like Welsh Water doesn’t get around the questions of compensation, debt or legal risk”
The parliamentary case is led by Clive Lewis, whose own water bill had its first reading a week before the Cunliffe review was commissioned, and who secured an urgent question on the sector in June. He told the Commons then that this “was never a market failure” but “the market working as designed”. Allies of Lewis say that like-minded MPs are prepared to rebel if government proposals do not go far enough.
Lena Swedlow, the deputy director of Compass, tells The House that the left-wing pressure group is now campaigning with Labour MPs to push the government to more wide-ranging action.
“I think we got here because Ofwat and the Starmer-led government believed the creditors and the Thames Water leadership could get themselves out of this mess, which was short-sighted.
“It’s part of the larger theme of Starmer’s No 10 that they didn’t adequately prepare for power, and figures like Morgan McSweeney are now on record saying so. Fast-forward two years later, the hesitance to put Thames Water in special administration is as short-sighted and dangerous.”
Those supportive of implementing the special administration regime are “incensed” by the clear change in government language from public ownership to control.
However, the government is clear that the special administration threshold hasn’t been cleared, as of now. The law only allows it if a company is insolvent or in serious breach of its licence, and while creditors keep lending, Thames is not insolvent. “You either are, or you aren’t,” Environment Secretary Angela Eagle said this month. “And whatever people think of Thames at the moment, it isn’t technically insolvent.”
Another plan is that of the Co-operative Party, which Burnham recently became the first Prime Minister to represent.
A recent report by the Good Growth Foundation think tank, with a foreword by Labour MP Helena Dollimore, proposes a bill that would create a path to mutualisation by encouraging water companies to sell up to customers via a share exchange scheme. If they refused to comply, the bar for an enhanced special administration regime would be lowered.
As with nationalisation, the government is thought to have cooled on the co-operative idea, with industry sources expecting the plans to go nowhere.
Officials recognise that any attempt to mutualise would likely lead to the largest rise in customer bills, as investors would be unwilling to stomach any short-term losses without an equity stake. Investors agree, highlighting the mutualised Welsh Water as having the highest bills in Britain.
The left of the party is sceptical too, for the opposite reason.
Mainstream says mutuals work well in many settings but that water needs something stronger, and that it is not clear mutualisation changes who owns anything.
Swedlow says: “Of course devolved and regional leaders should have a say in the future of water. But copying the failed model of non-profits like Welsh Water doesn’t get around the questions of compensation, debt or legal risk.”
One policy wonk highlights that, currently, the Co-operative Party, the Liberal Democrats and Reform all have policies to mutualise water, all with little clarity about what would actually happen next.
What seems sure either way is a significant downgrade in the powers of Ofwat, with responsibility set to be transferred to ministers. The regulator has not had a permanent chief executive since August 2025, and cannot have a successor until the government’s clean water bill is introduced.
The research of the financiers into Burnham’s bus plan seems to be beneficial – earlier this month, The Telegraph reported that regional bodies would be set up to oversee water companies, with a responsibility to hold company bosses accountable for bills and sewage.
As Burnham battles for control, water waits. For the moment, the sector once in the eye of the storm waits to find out the government’s decision and MPs wait to hear the direction of travel.
Within a month of Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Andy Burnham’s government will have delivered its first Budget and Thames Water’s lenders will have decided whether to extend its emergency funding without a signed rescue deal. Labour’s new 10-year plan promising “stronger public control” of water is set to be delivered by the end of the year too. Here are the three leading plans circulating around Westminster.
Public ownership.
Mainstream, the Andy Burnham-affiliated campaign group co-founded by Compass and Open Labour, has drafted a conference motion calling on the Prime Minister to “urgently return water in England into public ownership”. Its paper, The Productive State, sets out the details: put Thames Water into special administration, restructure its debts and have it function as a national public water corporation, run at arm’s length from ministers and paying for investment by borrowing against customers’ bills.
A private solution.
London & Valley Water, a consortium of 100 investors holding £17bn of Thames’ £21bn debt, wants to take over the beleaguered firm. Its £10bn plan would write off billions of debt, add new capital and pay no dividends until 2035. In return, it wants leniency on penalties worth up to £1bn. In June, the then environment secretary Emma Reynolds said the deal did not go far enough – a month later, the creditors offered the government a “golden share”, offering a veto over important decisions and hostile takeovers.
Mutualisation.
A proposal by the Good Growth Foundation, backed by the Co-operative Party and three Labour metro mayors, suggests a law giving water companies a choice: sell up to customers through a share exchange, or face a lower bar for special administration and leave it as a customer-owned co-operative. While it would keep the debt off the government’s books, investors say that borrowing costs and bills would rise without shareholders to absorb any losses.
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Politics
Politics Home | “Status Quo Not An Option”: Defra Secretary Hints At Action On Thames Water
Andy Burnham is rumoured to make an announcement on Thames Water in his speech to Labour’s party conference (Alamy)
4 min read
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Angela Eagle has hinted that government action on Thames Water is coming, telling PoliticsHome that “the status quo is not an option”.
Speaking to PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown at Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Sunday, Eagle said the privatised system currently in place is not “working” and that she is “examining a whole range of potential options”.
Andy Burnham is facing calls to bring Thames Water into public ownership amid MP and public anger with the water company over its significant debts, rising customer bills and sewage leaks. The firm supplies 16m customers across southern England.
The Prime Minister is set to address the issue of private water companies in his first conference speech as PM on Tuesday afternoon, with a preview making the case for “more control of the basics so that we can make it more functional again”.
Eagle told the podcast that “legal certain obligations” meant there were limits on what she could say about Thames Water, but stressed that something has to change.
Asked whether the Thames Water situation would be allowed to stretch out into next year or beyond, Eagle said: “The Thames issue will be dealt with when it’s dealt with.
“We have to be absolutely certain that we do these things properly because there’s potential litigiousness if not done properly.”
The Environment Secretary held her first meeting with the leaders of the company earlier this month, insisting she was “polite”, but asked if she was angry about its conduct, she said: “My predecessor Emma Reynolds wrote to the regulator after Thames made its final offer on restructuring, saying that the offer as it was did not meet the environmental interests, or the interests of the customers.
“That’s where we are. There’s been a lot of stuff in the newspapers about how Thames are going to make a different offer that hasn’t materialised in fact yet.
“So I will wait and see what they come up with. But what’s absolutely certain is the status quo is not an option.”
The Labour MP for Wallasey continued: “We have had 40 years of a privatised water system that has not delivered the benefits that those that privatised it said it would.
“It was privatised without debt, so debt-free. It’s now £85bn in debt, and we have collapsing infrastructure in many places, high levels of water bills and sewage in our rivers and sea.
“That is not a system that’s working. And the Prime Minister has asked me to look to see what we can do to improve that, and that is what I’m doing.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Eagle, who is one of the longest-serving MPs in the House of Commons, said it feels easier to get things done in the Burnham government than it did in the Keir Starmer administration, explaining that, in her view, the civil service had become “very encrusted in process” in recent years.
She said there’s a “more coherent direction” at the centre of government thanks to Burnham’s vision: “We know what his basic parameters are and what he wants to achieve.”
Eagle, who revealed this was her 46th Labour conference, said Whitehall was much less “process” focused when Labour was last in power than it is now.
Reflecting on her time as an environment minister in the Tony Blair government, she told the podcast: “It was very, very different the second time around than the first. The first time was much faster decisions, much less process to get through.”
The cabinet minister told PoliticsHome there are too many consultations in the civil service, “consultations just coming out of every pore for no obvious reason,” joking: “You have to have a government write-round about whether you can breathe in.”
Eagle said much of it is because departments are worried about leaving themselves open to judicial review, where their decisions are taken to court and potentially overturned.
But she added: “We just have to get the boat out of the harbour, turn it over, get all the barnacles off it, and see if we can actually get faster processes.”
The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced and edited by Lulu Goad and Ewan Cameron for Podot
- Click here to listen to the full conversation with Angela Eagle on the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for ‘PoliticsHome’ wherever you get your podcasts.
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Politics
Politics Home Article | John Healey Pledges “Fiscal Discipline” and Hints At Welfare Reform
Healey hinted at welfare reform in Liverpool on Monday (Alamy)
2 min read
The Chancellor has pledged “fiscal discipline” and hinted at future welfare reform, arguing it is “not progressive to allow a bigger and bigger benefits bill”.
Speaking from Liverpool on the second day of Labour Party conference, Healey said that the “core” of the budget he will deliver next month will be “fiscal discipline”.
It comes after Healey inherited a difficult economic landscape from his predecessor, with growing concerns around the costs of government borrowing and an enduring war in Iran.
Healey told conference that the “hope” that Labour wants to bring to the country would be “earned through fiscal discipline, through good work, and through strong industries,” and he said he and the Prime Minister are “in lockstep that we will meet the fiscal rules, that we will maintain control of Britain’s finances.”
Elsewhere in the speech, Healey said: “I will bring fresh hope to build from the rock of fiscal discipline, built on a growing economy with good work and jobs in more places, built on a new age of industrialisation.”
While Healey was positive about the country’s outlook and the return to a Labour government, he said that “the money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now.”
Pointing to the Tories’ years in power, Healey said: “We had 14 years of flatlining Tory growth and living standards when Cameron’s austerity gutted our public services, when Johnson’s Brexit hammered our exports and Truss’s mini budget crashed the economy and collapsed confidence in Britain’s fiscal strength.”
Healey also used his speech on Monday to argue for the need for welfare reform, arguing that while the social security system “must always be there for those who can never work”, it is “not progressive to allow bigger and bigger benefits bill, and a system which offers an income but doesn’t offer a future.”
Pointing to the one million young people who are not in education, employment or training, Healey said that tackling this is “more than just an economic must. This is a moral duty.”
“I refuse to write off a million young people like the Tories have done.”
During his speech on Monday, Healey paid tribute to the former chancellor Rachel Reeves, pointing to her work on “financial discipline” and lifting the two-child benefit cap.
Healey also announced a new “local apprenticeship service” to help connect companies with young people, and said that the Government would commit to £6bn of contracts for British shipyards.
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