PCS is paralysed by General Secretary Fran Heathcote’s refusal to accept the authority of the NEC majority members elected only weeks ago.
This is a battle over who runs the union—the membership through their elected representatives, or a bureaucratic caste that has presided over years of defeats. And over what the union does: whether it accepts the government’s 3.5% pay offer, or mobilises to win more.
Heathcote appears to have instructed union employees to refuse the President and NEC access to union resources, including comms, and to refuse to facilitate meetings of the NEC and National Disputes Committee (NDC). The NDC’s paralysis means no decisions on industrial disputes. A sacked union rep is waiting for help with rent and bills. FCDO staff are waiting for the green light on strike action.
PCS members need a fighting, democratic union where members decide and officials provide.
Manufactured crisis
The 2026 NEC elections produced a clear result: the Coalition for Change (CfC) won a 21–14 majority and the presidency. Turnout was low, reflecting years of demoralisation and disengagement after repeated defeats under LU’s stewardship. But among those who did vote, the majority voted for change.
Yet LU and the General Secretary (GS) quickly moved to block the new majority from exercising its mandate by insisting that the NEC must operate under the previous year’s Standing Orders which, for example, prevent NEC members from reporting back to union members about NEC discussions and decisions.
These Standing Orders also say that a president’s ruling on standing orders can only be overturned by a two-thirds majority, i.e. 24 votes. This is the mechanism LU used in 2024–25 to allow then‑President Martin Cavanagh to rule by decree, ignoring the NEC majority and blocking attempts to implement conference decisions. The new Standing Orders proposed by CfC would allow the President to be overruled by a simple majority (18 votes).
As the Broad Left Network noted in their statement, ‘The same powers that Martin Cavanagh used to rule by decree in 2024–25 are now being defended by the General Secretary to prevent the newly elected majority from carrying out its mandate.’
The new president, Bev Laidlaw, could simply repeat Cavanagh’s behaviour. But CfC has taken a principled position: the NEC majority must be able to overturn presidential rulings, and the president must not wield monarchical powers.
LU defended presidential absolutism when it suited them. CfC is rejecting it even though it would benefit them. That contrast is the crisis in miniature: LU is defending their own power, not ‘the rules’.
The Independent Left’s (part of the CfC) account of the NEC meeting explains that a new NEC is not required to inherit standing orders from the previous year as though they were part of the union’s constitution. Standing orders are procedural rules adopted by the NEC for the conduct of its own business; they are not the PCS rulebook itself.
If the outgoing leadership wanted last year’s standing orders to have binding force over the new NEC, then those rules should have been openly shared with members, debated transparently, justified politically and voted on at an Annual Delegate Conference like all other rule changes. Instead, they are being used as an internal device to discipline the newly elected majority. On that basis, the new NEC had every right to consider and adopt its own standing orders consistent with the union’s rules and the democratic mandate given to it by members.
The proposed standing orders described by the CfC were modest democratic safeguards, not a coup. They would allow the NEC to:
• create additional subcommittees, including on pensions • make progress on conference decisions a standing item at subcommittee meetings • hold more frequent NEC meetings; circulate minutes and records of decisions to branches • allow motions to be debated and voted on so the NEC can respond to emerging issues • remove the gagging clause preventing NEC members from reporting discussions to reps and members, and • allow the president to be overruled by a simple majority.
The disputed proposals amount to making the NEC more transparent and accountable to the membership. A big concern is that compromising with the GS on what standing orders she will allow the NEC to pass will not just impact the transparency of the NEC, but will also mean that anytime she doesn’t agree with the NEC she can simply use sabotage to get her way.
Power grab
The conflict is not only about standing orders. It is also about who controls the union’s machinery. General Secretary Fran Heathcote has asserted that she alone controls staffing and communications. This allowed her to email PCS members setting out her faction’s narrative, while the NEC majority is forced to rely on personal social media accounts.
Heathcote’s article on the PCS website makes her intentions clear. She accuses the NEC of trying to ‘direct the work of union employees and interfere in the responsibilities of the General Secretary.’ The Independent Left’s article responds to this, saying that the GS ‘has put herself in sole control of our union, in place of the NEC you elected.’
The NEC is the governing body of the union. It is entirely appropriate for it to direct the work of officers. The NEC consists entirely of lay members, i.e. those who hold civil service jobs, and is elected every year, as compared to the General Secretary, who is a paid full time officer (total pay package £103,000) elected only every five years. Though not perfect — it is not recallable, and not elected at workplace meetings — the NEC is clearly closer to the rank and file’s current political and industrial feelings.
Heathcote claims, in a video message on the official PCS social media accounts, that she has taken steps to ‘make sure [members’] interests are protected.’ She frames this as defending democracy. It is bureaucratic autonomy from democratic oversight.
The government’s 3.5% pay remit (3.5% of the total pay bill, the distribution of which between staff would then be negotiated with the union in each department) is likely a real‑terms pay cut. Inflation is rising again, with the Bank of England forecasting a return to 4%. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research warns that it could go higher if energy prices spike. Civil servants therefore face another year of falling living standards.
PCS needs a national campaign, coordinated industrial action, and a strategy to win a higher pay rise. However, the GS and her faction, who negotiated the 3.5% and opposed the plan for strike action voted for at May’s Annual Delegate Conference, are using their coup to force the 3.5% on union members by inaction.
The situation bears similarities to the degeneration of the University and College Union (UCU) under General Secretary Jo Grady, where the concentration of power in the GS’s office hollowed out democratic structures and left the union incapable of waging a serious fight. UCU’s experience shows what happens when a GS becomes unaccountable. Strike strategy collapses. Members become demoralised. Turnout falls. Employers push through real‑terms pay cuts.
PCS is heading down the same road unless the rank and file intervene.
Coalition for Change flaws
The Coalition for Change won the Presidency and NEC majority because members wanted a democratic union capable of fighting on pay and conditions. Their platform emphasised restoring member‑led democracy, ensuring NEC control over union strategy, launching a coordinated national pay campaign, ending the presidential veto, and making the union transparent and accountable.
However, the GS’s actions expose the weakness of the broad left strategy in the unions: winning office through an electoral bloc, but without having first built a powerful rank and file movement in the workplaces and branches. Broad Lefts concentrate on winning positions inside the union machine while leaving the bureaucratic structure largely intact.
That means that, once the left wins office, it can find itself facing entrenched full-time officials, who control communications, staff structures and procedural devices, without the organised leverage from below needed to force the bureaucracy to obey the members’ mandate.
That’s not an argument for standing aside from the fight inside the NEC. The elected NEC majority must be defended. It is an argument against imagining that elections alone can democratise PCS.
A rank and file movement would seek to win elections, but its centre of gravity must be in the workplaces: organising branches, reps and members to act with officials where possible and independently of them where necessary. Without that, even a left NEC can be isolated by the machinery it has formally been elected to control.
Rank and file campaign
The immediate question isn’t which constitutional mechanism can break the deadlock. It’s how members can be mobilised to force the issue. CfC has already taken an important first step by launching a campaign, producing a workplace leaflet to inform members what is happening, and circulating a model motion for branches to pass and send to the General Secretary and President protesting the GS’s actions.
The campaign needs to spread. Every branch should urgently discuss the crisis, circulate the leaflet, pass motions defending the NEC, and demand that the GS withdraw her obstruction.
But this cannot be left as a campaign by CfC alone. Branches and activists do not need to agree with the programmes of the CfC factions to stand up for the democracy of their union. The ‘PCS Says No’ campaign to reject the sell-out of our pay strikes in 2023 went far wider than existing factions. By reaching out to all union-conscious members, we can revive engagement and build grassroots strength.
The next step should be the creation of a broad rank and file campaign, a united front around a simple democratic demand: stop the GS’s coup and defend PCS democracy.
Such a campaign should try to draw in every branch, every rep and every activist who agrees that the NEC and NDC must be allowed to function, regardless of their factional affiliation or wider political differences. It should organise branch meetings, workplace meetings, members’ bulletins and open organising calls. It should coordinate motions and statements, publicise which branches have backed democracy, and give members a way to act collectively rather than simply watch the battle unfold at the top of the union.
A Special Delegate Conference may prove necessary. But it should not be presented as a panacea; maybe other mechanisms can force the bureaucracy to retreat. Members should debate what rule changes are needed to prevent any future GS or President from overriding the elected leadership and the membership. The point is to put that decision in the hands of an organised movement of branches and activists, not just in the hands of the factions.
A campaign built in this way would be far more likely to win. If only the factions mobilise, the bureaucracy can present the crisis as an internal power struggle. If branches and workplaces mobilise around the defence of democracy, the issue becomes what it really is: whether PCS is run by its members or by officials who claim autonomy from democratic control.
Such a campaign could also begin to solve the deeper problem exposed by the crisis. It could create a genuine rank and file organisation inside PCS: a base of power in the branches and workplaces able to defend the NEC when it acts on its mandate, hold it accountable when it retreats, and push the union towards a fighting strategy on pay, jobs and conditions.
That rank and file organisation should fight for democratic control of disputes by the members concerned, the right of branches and reps to know what elected committees are deciding, the recallability of officials who defy the membership, and an end to the material privileges that separate full-time officers from the members they represent.
PCS is at a turning point. It can become a member-led, democratic, fighting union, or it can continue as a bureaucratic machine. The rank and file must defend their democracy because without it there can be no future for the PCS as a militant union.