Kate is a passionate advocate of the importance of great employment relations. With close to 30 years' experience with Acas, she has seen the cost of conflict from all angles. She has worked with many businesses and individuals to resolve their differences and to avoid harmful disputes.
As I approach retirement from Acas, I find myself reflecting on the changes in the workplace and in industrial relations that I have seen over the years.
When I joined Acas in early 1993, I had already worked in several government departments and didn't anticipate that Acas would get under my skin and keep me in place for 32 years. I joined just after the last significant upheaval in labour relations, and I leave just ahead of the enactment of this generation's most significant change in workplace legislation. I wonder about the landscape 30 years from now.
At that time, employers and trade unions were finding their way around the new Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 which blended new and existing employment provisions into one place, and which has been the legislative cornerstone for employment relations machinery and individual rights ever since. Unsnappily abbreviated to TUL(C)RA, the Act continues to be the mainstay of employment law in Britain and Acas conciliators and advisers always have it to hand.
Acas was established in 1975 and it's unnerving to realise that at the time of my arrival in 1993, it was a mere 18 years young. Now I am saying farewell as Acas approaches its 50th birthday celebrations. The changes in that time have been nothing short of remarkable. The numbers of individual disputes that we deal with is many times larger than in 1993, and whilst the extent of trade union membership has declined, and the number of collective disputes is smaller, they remain a central part of Acas's work and identity.
Misunderstanding still a big part of disputes
Some things have stayed the same though. Employers and employees are as vulnerable as ever to misunderstanding each other. I recall visiting claimants ('applicants' back then) and employers in their homes and workplaces and so often recognising that the issue, whatever it was, didn't need to have got that far.
Hurt feelings and poor communication had a lot to answer for then, and they still do now. It was always satisfying to reach a resolution on those individual cases, including one I recall where the employer pulled a sheaf of pre-printed dismissal letters from his filing cabinet with a flourish. I’d like to hope that the meeting was as memorable for him as it was for me.
Changes in collective disputes
How we conduct collective disputes has changed in that time. Pre-covid they were always face to face and in times past they often featured late sessions and a certain amount of tubthumping.
Now we take a blended approach, with some work done online. There are pros and cons to the new ways of working. Talks via Teams allow a better work-life balance, reduce the cost of travel (and late-night bacon butties at the conclusion of a protracted dispute). They likely remove something too.
Face to face allows a quicker build-up of trust and rapport, and it can be easier to 'read the room'. And yet the core is the same, whatever the setting. A soap factory, a secure hospital, a pork pie manufacturer – these were all places where disputes bubbled up and I was called in. We always got it sorted in the end, and the process for resolution is broadly the same now.
These days though the Acas conciliator will not emerge from the dispute with a large box of assorted soap to distribute amongst their colleagues, as I once did.
When I joined Acas in 1993, we were a much smaller organisation, and we have grown in parallel with the increase in individual employment rights. Collective disputes are fewer now, but as we all saw in the very recent past they can and do surge up. The public sector disputes of 2022 to 2023 were a strong reminder of that, and it was a professionally challenging time for me and a privilege to be influencing in those spaces.
The future of Acas
I leave Acas as an organisation doing brilliant work to shape the future of employment relations. Our next five-year strategy will be launched later in the year, focusing on preventing, managing and resolving disputes, and reminding us how Acas is critical to supporting good employment relations.
Colleagues will be sharing our policy thinking around the future of workplace relations in Britain at the upcoming resetting workplace relations conference 2025. We will be joined by some of the biggest names in employment relations and business success to look at the challenges and opportunities of the next period, and how we can together tackle them. I hope you can make it.
Working for Acas, and supporting its purpose, has been the pleasure and privilege of my life. I'm grateful for all I have seen and done and for the fantastic people that I have met along the way. I plan to keep in touch as I start my next chapter, and I'd love to hear your reflections of employment relations over the past 32 years. In the meantime, I'll be taking a short break in April and then look forward to a marginally slower pace of life. Marginally.