TUC Congress backs Prospect’s motion on resilience and regulation

The trade union movement has unanimously endorsed Prospect’s motion on UK resilience on the first day of TUC Congress 2025.

Moving the motion, Prospect President Ele Wade argued that while the UK has “world class systems of national resilience… those same systems have been undervalued, neglected, and denigrated by our own governments”.

She argued that “Instead of resourcing and empowering public sector specialists as our front line in a risky world, they have been undermined. Meanwhile governments are stuck in a loop of reacting, piecemeal, to the most recent crisis, only to be taken by surprise by the next.”

“We ae calling on government to remember that good regulation and expert design are foundations of resilient economic growth, quality jobs, technology that strengthens society instead of making it more vulnerable, and homes that are safe for people to live in.”

Prospect’s motion called on the TUC General Council to press the government to:

• ensure that all relevant bodies, including incident responders, are fully resourced and invest to retain and develop their skilled staff.
• redress the balance between core and competitive funding for research and innovation and provide longer-term budget certainty.
• enhance cross-departmental collaboration to ensure that knowledge and good practice are shared effectively.
• lead a national debate about the importance of this work and counter the rising tide of misinformation in the public domain.

The full text of the motion can be found here.

You can watch a video clip of Ele speaking on the motion here.

The motion was seconded by the FDA and passed unanimously by Congress.