Meeting, Document
Paper to note: update on Public Bodies’ Social Partnership reports
SPC Members are asked to note the update on Public Bodies’ Social Partnership reports (2024 to 2025).
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Background
- The Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 outlines that a public body must prepare, in respect of each financial year, a report of what it has done to comply with the social partnership duty imposed under the Act.
- The social partnership duties commenced on 1 April 2024. Public bodies subject to the legislation are now required to seek consensus or compromise with their recognised trade unions (or other representatives of staff where no trade unions are present) when setting their well-being objectives or making decisions of a strategic nature about the steps they intend to take to deliver those objectives.
- Each public body must agree its report with its recognised trade unions (or where there is no recognised trade union, other representatives of its staff) or, if has not been agreed, the report must contain a statement explaining why it was not agreed.
- Each public body subject to the social partnership duty is now required to publish and provide to the SPC an annual report on compliance with the duty covering activity in 24/25. There is no fixed deadline for the submission of reports.
- It was agreed at the first meeting of the SPC that these reports would be collated and analysed by the SPC secretariat. SPC members will be provided with a summary of these reports each year.
- Members have also requested additional information to be included in the reports to highlight good practice of Social Partnership working. The Minister wrote a letter to the Public Bodies requesting that information on the following be included:
- How frequently an employer met with trade unions as part of their Social Partnership duty.
- Whether training was provided for employees and trade union representatives on how the Social Partnership duty was to be/being implemented at that organisation; and.
- Any examples of where activity is progressing well in the reporting period, including case studies.
- There is no requirement on Public Bodies to provide any information over and above what is set out in the SPPP Act, however, the letter expressed how useful the information would be.
Update
- To date, six of the fifty-five Public Bodies subject to the duty have submitted their Social Partnership report for 2024 to 2025. Those Public Bodies are:
- Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council
- Mid and West Wales Fire Authority
- Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council
- Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council
- Centre for Digital Public Services
- North Wales Fire Authority
- The Public Bodies that have submitted a report have complied with the Social Partnership duty, having fulfilled the requirements set out in paragraphs 2 and 3 above.
- Regarding the additional information requested in the Minister’s letter, an early trend noted by the SPC secretariat is that Public Bodies are including meetings where they are discussing the Social Partnership duty but not providing exact details of when they occurred. This could be due to the first batch of reports being drafted prior to the Minister’s letter being issued.
- So far, no Public Body has provided any case studies as an example that Social Partnership arrangements are progressing well within the organisation. Again, this could be due to the early drafting of the reports.
Next steps
- A further update or initial analysis (depending on the number of reports received at that time) will be provided at the October meeting.
- Once all reports have been submitted by the SPC secretariat, a full summary report will be drafted and submitted to the SPC for consideration.
- All the submitted reports are publicly available, and the links will be published on the SPC website in due course, but the SPC Secretariat are happy to share links with members in the meantime if requested.