- Conference
- 2025 Water, Environment & Transport Conference
- Date
- 8 February 2025
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference notes that due to the impact of climate change, we are seeing more and more extreme weather. This impacts throughout the year and manifests itself in severe flooding, droughts, gales and snow and ice. This has a direct impact on our members within our WET service group. Water industry workers often bear the brunt of these extreme conditions. Ensuring that clean and wastewater treatment-works keep operational is essential for public health.
The naming of storms has been a regular news item across the UK since 2014, and as weather forecasting tools become more accurate, the general public are given more and more notice of these impending severe conditions. Regrettably, managers are not taking any notice until – it is too late -usually the day before. They are simply ignoring the issue or hiding behind improbable forecasting confidence – this is an excuse that will no longer wash.
This lack of preparedness is putting our members at unnecessary risk. Having contingency plans for severe weather costs money and companies must not gamble with safety and falling back on the goodwill of exhausted workers or risk Working Time Breaches.
UNISON’s Members lives are continually impacted at short notice with urgent calls to attend critical work but this extra work, if unchecked, can develop into fatigue – and we all know fatigue leads to bad decision making and even much worse outcomes.
Our Environment Agencies and Transport colleagues are impacted too and the WET sector must stand and work together to put pressure on our companies and hold them to account for their legal duty of care to our members by ensuring their health, safety and mental wellbeing is not compromised because of emergency planning money and resources being funnelled elsewhere.
Therefore, this conference calls on the WET Service Group Executive to:
1)Obtain from branches, where possible, (especially Water & Environment) any specific preparedness plans for these severe weather events.
2)Evaluate the plans in detail for best practice and share with the WET branches for their bargaining purposes.
3)In the event the Executive believes no best practice is available to share then we ask the Executive to approach UNISON’s health and Safety team, and other bodies as appropriate, to assist in evaluating the full risk of this new phenomenon and create an action plan on the best course of action – while keeping branches updated on a timely basis.