Why 2020 made me prouder than ever to be in Prospect

Jon Hollis, a natural flood management programme manager at the Environment Agency, writes about how the pandemic has affected his work, how he supported fellow members through the lockdown and why he’s so proud of what his branch has achieved this year.

Jon Hollis

Natural Flood Management (NFM) is the term that we give to nature-based solutions that help to reduce flood risk, and the programme that I look after has £15m of government funding.

We’ve got just under 60 pilot projects across England, looking not only at how we can reduce flood risk but also improve habitats and increase biodiversity. We want to reduce flooding, improve the environment but also share the learning and work with local communities so that they can make better use of NFM in the future.

Joining Prospect

I joined Prospect not long after I started working for the Environment Agency, which was in 2006. My line manager at the time was a member of the branch committee and he would often tell me a little bit about some of the work that the union was doing.

He pointed out that while we work for a good employer, and the Environment Agency is a good employer, sometimes there are shortcomings and things go wrong.

One of the things that I really like about Prospect, as opposed to some of the other unions, is the fact that Prospect isn’t politically affiliated. That being in a trade union doesn’t have to be a political thing is incredibly important to me.

Lockdown

I personally felt in a bit of a quandary because, yes, my day job is important and I believe passionately in what we’re doing, but at that moment I felt pushing hospital beds or picking up the phone to the elderly or vulnerable would have been a better use of my time.

At the beginning of March, I was in a really good place because I got married last November and I had just got back from honeymoon. Then it quickly changed to wondering what my purpose was in a changed world!

Around April, as well as doing what I could to keep my programme going, I started to volunteer to support some of the incident response that we were doing as an organisation. It was a coordination type role to move things forward and that gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

Prospect branch at EA

Instantly after the lockdown, the Environment Agency became proactively engaged with the recognised trade unions. We started having weekly calls to discuss the impacts on staff.

One of our managers described what we went through as organisation in a really good way, they said we weren’t managing a COVID incident, we were managing a working from home incident.

We were making sure that people had the right kit, that they felt connected and that they were feeling supported in the decisions they needed to make.

I was only elected president of Prospect’s EA branch last November, so it was really important for me to communicate with the members. I started more or less weekly update emails to my membership and they carry on now because there’s been so much going on.

The government made some announcements after lockdown when they were trying to get people back into offices, and I think some of the messages between the government and between the employer became a bit mixed.

Being able to clearly say in my weekly emails, there is no expectation for you to do X, Y or Z, that it is your choice and here are some of risk assessments. To be a really clear voice through this has, I think, has helped quite a lot of people.

Based on the feedback I’ve had the members have been really grateful for the updates, so they are aware of the things that are going on.

Looking back

I look back on the 2020, and how we handled it as a branch, with an enormous amount of pride.

I can’t do everything on my own, I have a fantastic committee around me, two vice-presidents and a branch secretary. Our health and safety reps have also really stepped up to the challenge as well.

Our employer has offered all staff a free flu jab, which I credit to a Prospect member, but I’ve found out that the EA may have already been thinking about it!

It’s been a very hard year but the relationship we have with our employer at the moment is a very good one; some people have even said it’s the best it has ever been.

I reflect on our pay increase earlier this year. We managed to negotiate 2.5%, which was the 2% plus 0.5% signed off by the secretary of state. It’s the best pay deal we’ve had in the Environment Agency for 10 years. It’s still is not good enough, but I feel incredibly proud that we have managed to do that for our membership.

I feel incredible proud that we’ve grown the membership of the branch by about 5% which is no mean feat in the current economic climate.

I feel incredibly proud that we’ve been able to represent the members in a range of different situations on a range of different issues.

I feel incredibly proud that after the Black Lives Matter movement took off, we as a branch took that very seriously. We worked with some of our BAME members to understand if we were representing their views and what could we do to attract more BAME members in the in the future.

I felt slightly daunted going into this role as president, but the fact that COVID-19 has given me a seat at the table with management has enabled me to grow and have some confidence in what we’re doing.

I feel quietly optimistic about what we can achieve together over the coming year and years.