Green reps deserve legal backing

I emailed my MP this week to ask them to support new legal rights for workplace green reps. It took about two minutes, and it is one of those small asks that could end up mattering quite a lot.

Here is the situation. Across the public sector there are union members who have taken on the role of green rep, or branch environment officer, entirely on top of their day job. They push for better recycling, sensible travel policies, decent building fabric, smarter procurement, and heating systems that do not haemorrhage energy into the sky. They do it because someone has to, and because the people who actually run a service usually know where the waste is hiding.

What they do not have is any legal standing. Health and safety reps have had statutory recognition since 1977. Union learning reps have it. Equality reps got it through the Employment Rights Act, with paid time off and facilities coming into force this October. Green reps have nothing. No guaranteed facility time, no right to ask for the data, no defined function in law. The TUC makes the point well: an enormous amount of energy gets burned up just negotiating what the role is allowed to be, which leaves very little left over for doing the work.

That gap shows up in the numbers. The TUC’s position paper notes that most organisations still lack even basic decarbonisation and climate adaptation plans, and that plenty of the ones with published targets have no credible route to reaching them. A target with no plan behind it is a press release.

I recognise a version of this from working in public services. Anyone who has spent time around building maintenance, heating systems, utility supplies or fleet knows that net zero targets do not get met in a strategy document. They get met, or missed, in thousands of small operational decisions taken by staff who are rarely asked what they think. Every retrofit choice, every boiler replacement, every property brought back into use carries a carbon consequence. The people doing that work hold a granular picture of where energy and money are actually going. Formalising a route for that knowledge to reach the people drawing up the plans seems like straightforward good sense, for the workforce and the employer alike.

There is a fairness argument alongside the practical one. Transitions reshape jobs. Fleet changes, building changes, service changes. If the people whose work is being reshaped have a seat at the table while the plans are drawn up, the plans come out better and the transition holds together. If they do not, you get decisions landing on people from above and a very reasonable loss of goodwill. UNISON’s framing of it is hard to argue with: a fair transition to net zero needs workers to have a voice.

Employment law is reserved to Westminster, so this is a matter for MPs regardless of where in the UK you are. If your union is running the same campaign, the action link is worth the two minutes.

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