Public and Commercial Services Union

We represent members working at these ONS sites:

• Newport (south Wales)
• Titchfield (Hampshire)
• London

ONS is a non-ministerial department led by the UK Statistics Authority, an independent body accountable to parliament. Its role is "promoting and safeguarding the quality of official statistics in the UK".

There's a PCS union branch at each of the ONS locations and a group executive committee consisting of representatives from each branch.

The group president is Gez Kirby and group secretary is Siân Wiblin.

ONS group conference sets the campaigning agenda for 2013/14

Our PCS ONS group conference decides our union's policies and priorities for our work in ONS over the forthcoming year, considering motions proposed by members at Titchfield and Newport. This year, the conference was held at Titchfield on 20 May.

Members' priorities for the next year call for campaigning on issues including PCS's Alternative to Austerity; pay, pensions, term & conditions of service and privatisation/outsourcing or 'mutualisation'; the Titchfield Staffing Strategy's impact on members; 'disruption' policy; attacks on trade union facility time; membership recruitment; and building a campaign, to include industrial action, opposing the new Performance Management System.

Delegates to group conference were very clear that only by uniting together within our campaigning union can ONS members hope to challenge the barrage of attacks from this out-of-touch government. They've cut our jobs, pay and pensions. They're starting to worsen our terms & conditions. Now they want to make it easier to sack hard-working staff, and they're trying to undermine our union reps' ability to protect members' interests. In the coming year, we must stand together and campaign strongly, so that we can resist the onslaught on ONS staff.

Gez Kirby
Group president