A Record in My Neck of the Woods

I have spent my life working in small organizations where the bookkeeper keeps a close eye on things. An overspend of £10.00 on coffee during a month has been cause for raised eyebrows; a missing invoice for a £7.99 purchase on Amazon inevitably results in an email requesting immediate clarification. 

I’m therefore bemused by the fact that the Unite Union has a project overspend of 1,600% and a black hole in the accounts amounting to £14 million on its new hotel and conference center in Birmingham. This raises some interesting questions about how the HR department at Unite could have intervened. 

The Project

Let’s first look at the facts relating to the project. 

I was so surprised by the BBC’s reporting of events that I thought it necessary to turn the tables on the BBC and do an independent ‘fact check’ on the BBC itself. Here is a succinct summary of what I’ve found: 

  • The Unite Union commissioned the building of a new hotel and conference center. 
  • The building was to be in Birmingham, with an estimated cost of £7 million. 
  • The eventual spend was £112 million. 
  • An independent valuation of the building concluded that it is now worth £29 million. 
  • The final accounts show that £14 million of the £112 million spend is unaccounted for. 

The Unite Union website tells us that it has 1.2 million members, so I thought it would be interesting to do some quick maths on how much the new build has cost each of them. Here are the results: 

  • Each member was expecting to pay £5.83 for the new building. 
  • It has actually cost each member over £93.33. 
  • There is a hole in the accounts that amounts to twice the entire budgeted cost. 

Back to the Unite website, and I find that for full-time workers, the most popular membership costs £17.20 per month. With 1.2 million members, the entire cost of the building could be paid for with five months of total subscriptions. 

Considering that the building will probably serve its members for generations to come, I guess it might still be good value at £112 million. But if I were a member of Unite, I think I would be asking the leadership the following questions: 

  1. At the beginning of the project, did anyone think to ask how much the building would be worth at the end?
  2. Who sanctioned the payments of £14 million (the black hole) without documenting what the payments were for?

HR Involvement

The circumstances outlined above suggest serious managerial deficiencies, which raises some interesting questions about the role of human resources at Unite. Let me say from the outset that I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I find it intriguing to ponder them. 

The Unite “Rule Book” extends to 51 pages, on which you can find 64 references to “membership” and 84 references to “politics” but not a single reference to “human resources.” Further, when you search the Internet for “human resource department in the Unite Union”, Google doesn’t list a single reference to the Unite website in the first two pages. I can’t help but wonder if there even is a human resource department at Unite. 

That leads me to the next train of thought: if someone working at Unite has a grievance with the organization, then who do they go to? 

Unite has an annual subscription intake of around £250 million, and that must involve a lot of people to manage it. Who looks after their internal employee relations? Who looks after compliance, policy development, and health and wellness? Most importantly, does Unite have qualified people on hand to deal with the intricacies of human behaviour, or does it rely on guidance in these areas from people whose specialties and priorities lie elsewhere? 

And so, to the question of who do we blame for that 1,600% overspend and the £14 million black hole… 

If there had been a well-trained and well-organized HR department at Unite, would they have ensured that somewhere in someone’s job specification there was a requirement to document what each outbound payment was for? 

Would the HR department have insisted that someone needed to take budget responsibility for each and every large-scale project that was undertaken? And would they have made sure that the same someone reported on each and every potential overspend throughout the life of the project? 

Could it be that there were just so many gaps in the reporting procedures that nobody fully understood who was responsible for what? Would a good HR department have ensured that the gaps were filled? 

It could be that there is a fully functioning HR department at Unite, but Google can’t find them. It could also be that the well-meaning management of Unite didn’t realize just how badly wrong things could go when in-house expertise was ill-equipped to deal with a building project of this scale. 

Ultimately, I am left wondering if Unite failed to recognize that its people are its most valuable resource and maybe, just maybe, they are not being as well looked after as they should be. 

And to end… 

One of the remarkable qualities of human nature is its ability to find humour even in the darkest of topics. Here’s something that recently gave me a laugh-out-loud moment: 

“The easiest job in the world has to be coroner. Surgery on dead people. What’s the worst thing that could happen? If everything went wrong, maybe you’d get a pulse.” – Dennis Miller.” 

Colin King – CEO of HR Quizzes