- Conference
- 2025 Local Government Service Group Conference
- Date
- 12 February 2025
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference notes the rapid spread of new technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) across UK local government.
These new systems promise increased efficiency and productivity, and as such can appear to be attractive to local service providers grappling with the sector’s entrenched issues of underfunding, under-resourcing and steadily growing demand.
Conference recognises the many potential benefits to local government of using AI systems, and particularly those that improve the experience of workers. For example, AI technology can be used to complete repetitive tasks, reducing the administrative burden on staff and freeing up time to perform other, more rewarding elements of jobs.
However, Conference also notes that AI cannot provide expertise in formal settings, for example hearings; and the use of AI in local government can present many risks to services, and workers.
Some of these risks are being increasingly recognised by policymakers and local government leaders, such as the potential to cause harm to citizens if systems go wrong. When algorithmic systems are introduced into our public services, the implications of mistakes in those algorithms can be catastrophic for vulnerable individuals reliant on services. There are also concerns about the tech lobbying firms that are pushing increasing AI use.
Conference echoes these concerns and calls for all deployment of AI in local government to take full account of these risks, and for councils to actively work to prevent such harm to the public.
However, Conference also believes that the risks posed directly to local government workers by new technologies in their workplace are being overlooked. Urgent action needs to be taken to protect workers and ensure their voices are heard in this technological transition.
The impacts of AI on workers include work intensification, risks to health and safety, discriminatory and unfair outcomes, lack of control over data, loss of privacy, lack of human agency and freedom over work, and the degradation of human judgement and skill.
However, the impact of AI on workers and their needs and concerns are being sidelined at all stages of the digitalisation process in local government. The workforce is not being adequately considered in policymaking discussions, and the government is embarking on a rapid process of AI roll-out across the public sector without sufficient worker and union engagement.
At a workplace level, this pattern continues. New AI systems are being introduced into local government workplaces without any worker consultation, and trade unions are being notified of their use after they have been deployed – if they are notified at all. This lack of worker and union engagement is unacceptable.
This Conference believes that the digitalisation of local government is a critical and pressing issue for the sector, and that UNISON needs to mobilise rapidly on the issue.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to:
1) Establish AI and digitalisation of local services as a key campaigning and organising issue for the SGE;
2) Seek to ensure that national local government employers’ organisations engage in consultation and negotiation and conduct impact assessments when new AI technologies are deployed in the workplace, and support regions and branches to seek to ensure the same happens in individual employers;
3) Develop and promote materials to support local government UNISON activists in recognising, understanding, negotiating and organising on AI and technology issues in the workplace;
4) Work with the NEC and other Service Groups to develop and promote union policy and strategy on the use of AI in the public sector.
