PENSIONS: The TUC has agreed to demand ministers address loopholes allowing employers to withdraw or exclude staff from the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.

Congress backed the measures in a NASUWT motion, which condemned yesterday the United Learning Trust for encouraging staff to leave the scheme.

Wayne Broom, the union’s senior vice-president, told delegates: “It is vital that both the government and the pensions regulator take action against public-sector employers which offer higher salaries to employees in return for opting out of public-sector schemes.”

EDUCATION: Unions will lobby government for meaningful investment in post-16 education following a unanimous vote at TUC Congress yesterday.

University and College Union (UCU) general secretary Jo Grady moved the motion, urging Labour to pump money into post-16 education and its staff after 14 years of Tory “cuts, cuts, cuts.”

She said: “Infrastructure is on its knees — underfunded, undervalued and underpaid.

“The call from our union is to back Labour, but it must back UCU members as well.”

MENTAL HEALTH: Suicide prevention training must be introduced in all workplaces, TUC Congress resolved yesterday. 

Delegates raised the alarm over the rising number of suicides among people of working age as they backed a NASUWT motion proposing the measures.

A survey of the union’s members found that 87 per cent have lost sleep due to work-related worries.

WORKERS’ RIGHTS: Sir Keir Starmer must keep his promise to close gaps in law that allowed P&O Ferries to sack 786 maritime workers without notice or consultation in March 2022, Congress demanded yesterday.

The Prime Minister pledged at the 2022 TUC Congress that Labour would do so within its first 100 days in government, delegates noted.

Nautilus International’s motion was passed with a RMT amendment calling for the “urgent lobbying of government and MPs to support these demands and also a demonstration at Parliament in March 2025, close to the date of the third anniversary of the P&O Ferries sackings, in support of this campaign.”