The House | Unison’s Andrea Egan: I’m Not Rejoining Labour Until The Party Inspires Me

Andrea Egan (Photography by Tom Oldham)

11 min read23 min

When The House first met Andrea Egan last year, she was standing as an underdog in the race to determine who would become the next general secretary of Britain’s biggest union.

Although she had the advantage – unprecedented in Unison – of being a single challenger against an incumbent, only the flame-haired social worker herself was confident she would win. After all, she was neither a paid union official nor a Labour member; it would be the first time a lay member of Unison had been elected to lead it.

But lead the 1.3-million-member trade union she now does, after securing 60 per cent in the internal contest that attracted a typically low turnout of just seven per cent. At the time, it was another blow for No 10, which lost an ally in the defeated Christina McAnea – widely thought to be another casualty of Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity.

Egan not only defied the odds to become head of Unison but also got her wish with a new Prime Minister she favoured for the job. “I am a fan of Andy. I mean, he’s the King of the North!” as the left-winger from Bolton put it to us in November.

“He’s made a real positive start,” the trade union leader tells The House today, noting that she was “really pleased” with Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign. “The way he approached that election – he wanted to listen to what people wanted to say, and he was open and honest enough to say, ‘Look, the Labour Party’s made mistakes.’ At that time, it was really important for society to hear some honest politics.”

She has already met with the new Labour Prime Minister on several occasions amid No 10’s effort to step up engagement with unions. In meetings with Tulo (as the group of party-affiliated unions is known), she reports that “he acknowledged that the trade unions had been left aside in the previous couple of years”. There is a “much better commitment” now, “absolutely”, she says, and a “better working relationship”.

“It was reassuring when he said, ‘I’m going to put the trade unions back in the front and centre,’ because why would we not be? We represent the workers who are delivering the public services. And he’s kept good with that promise. He’s met us a number of times.”

The Unison general secretary warns that Burnham is “not exempt from criticism”, though is careful not to criticise his controversial pick of chancellor, despite having endorsed Ed Miliband before the decision was made. Did the John Healey appointment come as a disappointment?

“I won’t say I was disappointed,” she replies carefully. “I felt Ed, and it was all in my own personal view, his vision for where the country needed to go was OK, was good. But I’ve made clear internally and to Andy, it’s not really our role as trade unions to tell him who to put in his Cabinet. So, if he’s picked John Healey, he’s picked John Healey, and we’ve got to respect that. Listen, the real issue is whether they deliver or not.”

Healey became Chancellor after resigning as Starmer’s defence secretary over a lack of military spending, of course. Egan, on the other hand, backs the “Wages not weapons” campaign by some unions – passed as a motion by the TUC this year for a second time – to call for investment in public services rather than defence.

“Well, that was his previous position. He’s now Chancellor, and his budget requirement and options are much wider than just defence,” she points out.

Egan does not support any increase in defence spend, let alone a three per cent of GDP or higher target. Is she not persuaded by the threat of Russian aggression, the possibility of conflict with China, perhaps even the need to defend the Falklands at some point soon?

“What are you defending, if your own infrastructure is broken and this society is not a healthy society?” she asks in response, before adding: “When you look at recent wars, we’ve been in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen. So, is that keeping our shores safe? We’ve got to be honest about what that money is actually being spent on.”

Nor does she accept the Westminster consensus that welfare spend needs to come down.

“Well, what is welfare spending? That’s the key question,” she says. “A big chunk of that is actually pensions, and that is deferred income for people who have already put into the pot.

“Then you’ve got to be really honest and realistic that a big chunk of our trade union membership is in these low-paid, insecure jobs, in these outsourced companies, and that low pay means they need to rely on benefits to exist. So, it’s all fictitious. Like Andy says, we’ve got to start having some very honest conversations.”

Although Egan holds back from criticising Healey directly, she is happy to make clear her view of the Home Secretary, who she says has “not even answered requests for a meeting”.

Unison wants to express its concerns over the government’s proposals to increase the time migrants will have to wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain status; the standard going up from five to 10 years, rising to 15 years for those who arrived on health and social care visas.

“That was one of my disappointments – that Shabana Mahmood was left in position, simply because of her position on the migrant workers. As yet, there’s just a wall of silence at the moment.

“I think that’s absolutely unacceptable because they make these big announcements, and what they’ve got is these hundreds of thousands of workers who are just being left on a thread at the minute, wondering where their futures lie and what’s going to happen to them and their families.”

Unison, a primarily public sector union that represents more social care workers than any other, is lobbying for changes not to apply retroactively: “It was a deal – come to the country for five years, do the work, and then you get leave to remain.”

Egan also wants their visas no longer to be tied to specific employers. “It’s got to be sector-wide,” she says. “The victimisation of those workers because you’re tied to one employer – that’s where the abuse happens… There’s a fear about raising your head and reporting them because the threat is there and it is real: ‘If you speak out, we’ll report you to Home Office, we’ll sack you’.”

Her overriding argument speaks to something fundamental – and very challenging – that Burnham wants to achieve in government: the creation of a ‘national care service’. “What I have said to Andy Burnham is, ‘You’re not going to be able to deliver that without the migrant workers.’”

And was he receptive to that message? “He nodded,” she recalls. “We were in a big meeting, and he acknowledged my statement.”

Egan, who was raised by a single mum on a Bolton estate, worked in the care sector herself; in a care home at 19, then children’s residential care. A union rep, she worked her way up, becoming manager of the unit, then convenor for children’s services, and ultimately a social worker.

“I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me”

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She joined the Labour Party about 16 years ago, yet was expelled in 2022 after sharing posts by Marxist group Socialist Appeal, which was proscribed under Starmer.

Asked whether she would like back in, Egan says: “I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me.

They expelled me. I’m now the leader of the biggest trade union in the country, and what I have said is, ‘You need to start behaving like a Labour Party.’”

Extraordinarily for the leader of the largest trade union, which is affiliated to the Labour Party and continues to be one of its biggest donors, she is “waiting for a number of things” before considering a fresh membership application.

“They’d have to do something that would inspire me and instil my trust again that the Labour Party can behave and deliver like the Labour Party,” she says. Has she been given assurances that she would be let in? “After four years, I can reapply anyway… So, it is a choice thing.”

In the meantime, she is allowed to attend Labour conference but not permitted entry to the main hall.

When Egan last spoke to The House, she said she would not move down to London, where Unison headquarters sits on Euston Road, if she became general secretary. That has not changed – and fortunately for her, splitting one’s time between North and South is in vogue right now.

“My husband and my son are still in Bolton. That’s my family home. But whether I need to be down in the London office, the West Midlands, Glasgow – I’ll be wherever. You only need to look at my diary. I’m all over the place.

“The same is said about how many days you work. Ideally, you’d want to be working a standard working week, wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t work out either. So, I’m just wherever I need to be.”

Egan also pledged to shun the £181,000 remuneration available to the general secretary, vowing to take only a social worker’s salary, without specifying what this figure would be. Has she been able to fulfil that pledge?

“For clarity, I’m taking a social worker’s salary, and that is within the scope of a social worker’s salary,” she replies, which suggests it may be the general average of around £40,000 but could also be much higher. She has not yet donated the remainder to Unison funds as promised; it is “sat in the account because I want to do it year-end”.

So, what will her final salary be?

“It’s a social worker’s salary,” she reiterates, unwilling to clarify. “What I will do is, I’ll publicise it at the end of the year to my membership. The only people I’m accountable to, if I’m really frank, is my membership, and you don’t say anything to your membership you’re not prepared to deliver on. So, I will deliver on that, and I will let my membership know.”

In our last interview, Egan also said she would not feel comfortable with the union representing someone like Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse who complained about having to use the same hospital dressing room as a trans colleague. “We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them,” she explained.

Has this situation arisen since she has become general secretary? “You can imagine: members come with all kinds of issues. They stole money, they’ve assaulted somebody, they’ve been accused of being racist. You don’t have to represent every single member through the rulebook because there’s some standard,” she says today.

The Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender in the Equality Act is “unworkable”, she adds, before stumbling over her words, trying to decide whether she “respects” the law as it stands.

She settles on: “You’ve got to adhere to the law. But at the same time, we absolutely will be looking at how we challenge that.”

While others favour reopening the Equality Act to change how it defines gender in light of the court ruling, Egan is not so sure. “I never said we were open to opening the Equality Act because where do you stop?” she asks. The implication is that it could open a Pandora’s box; she is deeply concerned by Reform UK’s plans to scrap the Equality Act, as well as the threat the party’s potential electoral success poses to unions.

For now, her focus is primarily on a campaign pressing the government to deliver on its manifesto promise to “bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation”.

Have the unions involved figured out how much the insourcing they proposed would cost upfront? “Work is being done, but our bottom line is really clear: it would pale into significance to what’s already been lost through the public purse.”

Egan is “loving” her new job. “I feel more optimistic than I did last year. I feel more excited than I did last year because I’m now – I mean, that was an historic win,” she says.

“I’m a working-class woman. A working-class woman from a town who has always felt that my position as a council employee, as a trade unionist, as a community member, are connected. It’s all for the good of.

“I did say this to Keir Starmer before he left: ‘Listen, I’m not an oppositionist for the sake of it, because if you win, we win, society wins.’ I think that’s where we’re at now. We’ve got one opportunity for really trying to get us back to a better place.”