We in the Independent Left have committed to a long term goal of ‘Refounding PCS’. This means we will seek to take forward radical changes to the constitution of PCS that will return control of the union to its members via elected democratic structures.

In this article, we set out why such a refounding is needed, and how we will seek to do it.

The case for constitutional change

Many PCS activists and members – especially but not exclusively those who have been around long enough to remember the battles with the right in the first half decade of the union’s existence – have a sense of our union being different to the other big unions. We are a lay-led union, we tell ourselves, with every senior elected national officer in the union’s history coming directly from the shop floor. We are an organising union who care more about building our industrial strength than hobnobbing with the labour (and Labour) aristocracy. And we are a democratic union, with our annual delegate conference and annual all-out NEC elections.

We take pride in these ideals – but in reality, they are on life support.

The union remains lay-led in theory but in practice the direction of the union is set less and less by our elected NEC and more by a small group of unelected full time officials surrounding the general secretary. Information of critical importance is not disclosed to NEC members or to the Assistant General Secretary and activists are left to put together the pieces of whatever information does slip out.

The notion that PCS is an organising union is not borne out by reality. PCS has for many years now been a minority union, and our actions have too often betrayed our weakness rather than shown what strength we do have. Our national campaign has been run into the ground year after year by a leadership that sees member apathy as part of the PCS furniture rather than something that they are responsible for shifting. The organising vision of PCS’s Left Unity leadership received the ultimate rebuke at 2024 Annual Delegate Conference when the union’s proposed Organising Strategy was voted down by conference delegates.

Finally, PCS’s democratic processes and culture are under serious strain. We still elect our NEC annually, and our annual delegate conference can still make the leadership squirm. But, increasingly, the Left Unity leadership have been able to ignore the clearly expressed will of members at little procedural cost. To give a few examples:

1) PCS conference year in, year out passes policy that endorses trans and non-binary liberation and seeks to put PCS front and centre of the global fight against transphobia. Yet this clearly expressed will of members is systematically ignored by the union’s Left Unity leadership, which refuses to be transparent on its discussions with the Cabinet Office on trans and non-binary inclusion in the civil service, and has sought to override and interfere with the operation of the PCS Proud network. Most shamefully, in 2025 conference delegates were not even allowed to see pro-trans equality motions, let alone vote on them.

2) The union’s Left Unity leadership have again and again stood in the way of constitutionally sound attempts to revive our national campaign. The President repeatedly used his veto to prevent the 2024-25 Coalition for Change majority from having motions on the national campaign heard at the NEC. After many branches submitted calls for a Special Delegate Conference to unblock the issue, rather than taking these concerns seriously, the General Secretary took reprisal action against the branches involved, writing a ticking off letter to members. The number of branches who had submitted calls for an SDC was never released, and it is unclear whether the threshold for triggering an SDC was actually met. In any case, the personal role that the General Secretary was able to play in the process ran counter to the original purpose of a special delegate conference, which is to provide a check and balance against leadership between ADCs.

3) Regional and group decision-making should be a building block in our union’s democracy, but these structures have too often been overruled or ignored by national PCS leadership. The general secretary has imposed changes to group compositions with little if any engagement with the groups and branches affected. At regional level too, the general secretary has prevented regional committees – and especially the London and South East regional committee – from carrying out important organising and political work.

The damning fact is that PCS members in increasing numbers have decided that democratic engagement is not worth the effort: a mere 6.4% of members voted in the last NEC elections.

For all these reasons and many more, we in the Independent Left believe that change is needed.

What is the solution?

One way of addressing these issues is to simply replace the current leadership, by winning national NEC elections (including the Presidency) in 2026 and beyond, and the next General Secretary election in 2028. Independent Left will campaign for this change in leadership, and seek to put in place union leaders who will respect the constitution and not seek every possible loophole to overrule the will of members.

But simply changing the leadership is insufficient, for a number of reasons. Firstly, respecting the will of members should not be a question that is up for debate every election time – it should be a foundational tenet for the union. Secondly, we are clear-eyed enough to know that even the most principled wielders of power require checks and balances in order to prevent bureaucratic backsliding. And thirdly, because the core underlying challenge that our union’s democracy faces – that the power balance between the bureaucracy and lay members and reps is all wrong – cannot be solved by change of leadership alone.

What PCS needs – and what the Independent Left is committed to seeking – is a comprehensive revision of our constitution and standing orders to ensure that in future, it will be members that control our union.

What will it take to refound PCS?

We call this process ‘refounding PCS’. This is because such changes would not involve marginal dry tweaks to a few PDFs, but a substantive reimagining of what our union’s constitutional settlement should be.

Such a process would represent a genuine ‘refounding’ of our union – taking the old values of lay control, organising, and democracy, and creating new constitutional arrangements that will make them real at every level of our organisation.

We can imagine the types of changes that could be pursued through this process:

– Increasing the NEC’s role in supervising the deployment of union resources, including staffing structures and transparency of legal advice

– Improving transparency of NEC meetings, with clearer records and fewer gags of NEC members on discussing non-sensitive matters

– Better record keeping of historical conference and NEC decisions and accountability mechanisms for ensuring they are delivered

– Increasing the number of senior union officer posts that are subject to election by members

– Greater rep access to member data and communications, improve our organising ability, unmediated by PCS bureaucracy

– Giving group and regional committees more control over resources and activities, and a formal say over restructures

– Changing the standing orders of the national executive committee to ensure that Presidents cannot unreasonably override the will of a majority of elected NEC members

– Improving the way that national elections are conducted, including arrangements for regional hustings and nominations

This is a non-exhaustive list of objectives and any process of refounding our union would need to gather views and input from across members and activists to ensure we seize the full opportunity for democratic revitalisation that such an initiative presents. Something like a constitutional convention- where an ad hoc committee made up of a representative cross-section of reps and lay members is brought together to develop proposals- may be required in order to bring different ideas together. The Independent Left welcomes views from all members of the union on further outcomes that we might seek to achieve from the process of refounding our union.

Delivering such objectives is likely to involve a range of interventions, including conference motions (most requiring 2/3 majority support), changes to NEC standing orders, and potentially all-membership ballots. This is going to be a long haul process, which reps and activists will need to bring members along with.

For this very reason we have adopted Refounding PCS as a campaigning priority. We will not win the changes we need through the back door, or with a general aye at a single conference – but through an active campaign that explains to members why democracy matters, why it is in peril in our union, and what we are going to do about it.

So we will be not only considering what motions we can bring to this and future ADCs to give effect to our aims, but also speaking directly to members in our branches about the union they want to build in the long term, and the role that they can play in delivering it. We encourage other branches to do likewise through discussions at all member meetings.

Our union’s democracy has been circling the drain for too long. The Independent Left calls on all members, reps and activists to support us in Refounding PCS and building a better union.