The Certification Officer has now issued his decision in Blake and McGaughey v UCU. One complaint was upheld in part as a technical breach. The rest were dismissed, and no rerun or further remedy was ordered. I wrote about the case before the hearing [here]. The full decision can be read [here], and I would encourage members and onlookers to read the ruling directly, and make up their own minds both about the decision itself and about the framing UCU HQ has deployed in the “5 page summary” emailed to all members on 31 March 2026.

Election guidance and the rules of the election

The case concerned whether the union’s own election rules were followed fairly, including in relation to the use of union resources and the conduct of the election. This is a limited and disappointing result. It clearly did not produce the remedy Ewan and I sought. Ewan and I brought this complaint because we believed there had been breaches of the election rules, and because members were entitled to greater transparency about how the election had been conducted.

The ruling did reject one of the most troubling arguments UCU HQ ran in the case: that the agreed election guidance was not really part of the rules governing the election at all. UCU’s own advance written legal submissions, the skeleton argument, treated that issue as one of “particular importance” and argued that, if the election guidance were not rules, the complaint should fail at the outset. We argued that the election guidance must count as rules for the purposes of the election because it was the document candidates and members were expected to campaign under, and because it set out the operative restrictions on use of union funds and resources, email lists and hustings arrangements. The Certification Officer accepted that the guidance counted as union rules, and that the complaint could therefore proceed.

Had UCU HQ succeeded on that point, election guidance would have been reduced to an optional framework, or worse, left open to selective interpretation in ways that could advantage some candidates over others. In other words, UCU HQ deployed a preliminary argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would have left candidates expected to follow rules which HQ would have been free to treat as irrelevant if challenged. All candidates entered the election under the expectation that they would follow this democratically agreed guidance, and members were entitled to understand it as governing conduct throughout the contest. To argue against that status was dangerous because it would weaken the integrity of the election process.

The breach found

The Certification Officer found a breach in relation to the General Secretary’s use of the UCU StreamYard account for a campaign broadcast. Union resources were therefore found to have been used in breach of the election guidance. He treated the breach as technical, and made no enforcement order on the basis that steps had already been taken to prevent recurrence and that the election had otherwise been conducted substantially in accordance with the law.

On UCU’s own list of issues, it was agreed that the UCU StreamYard account had been used for a campaign broadcast, though UCU HQ characterised this as an error and disputed the effect this would have on the election result. Our case was never that this point stood alone, but that it formed part of a wider pattern of resource use and advantage to the incumbent raised across multiple complaints.

The anonymity issue

As I noted in my February post prior to the hearings, our four witnesses did not feel safe speaking under their own names. The fact that key evidence in a case about the conduct of our own union came from witnesses who felt unsafe making their identities public is itself a sign that “normal” internal routes to resolve complaints could not safely be relied on in the current context. The ruling does not remove that concern, and in fact throws into sharper relief how difficult it is to prove structural problems when the people best placed to describe the issues feel unable to do so openly. The fact that our witnesses remained anonymous because they feared repercussions for speaking up, including on their future working lives, remains one of the most serious aspects of the case. That concern arose in a context where UCU, as an employer, has been in repeated dispute with the staff union Unite UCU (LE127). This includes the long-running Safe and Professional Workplace dispute, which has involved multiple rounds of strike action and action short of strike, including recent strike action in February 2026 over trade union victimisation and workplace treatment.

The anonymous witness evidence was admitted to the hearings despite objections made by UCU HQ before and during the hearing process. Once that evidence was admitted, the question became what weight could be attached to it in a process that expects named witness statements and oral evidence where relevant. In the ruling, the CO says he gave the anonymous witness statements “little, if any, weight” and did not rely on them owing to the absence of a statement of truth, the inability to conduct cross-examination, what he characterises as multiple hearsay concerns, and his expressed view that it would have been “reasonably practicable” to call the witnesses, including former employees. The difficulty is that this does not sit outside the substance of the case. Where fear makes open evidence hard to give, the weakness of the evidence and the conditions producing it are not neatly separable. 

Disappointingly, UCU HQ repeatedly framed the case in factional terms, both in documentation provided to the CO and in commentary to the press prior to the hearings. That framing displaced the substance of the complaints with speculation about the motives of those raising them. It is damaging to the union as an official line, and it obscures a central difficulty in a case like this: if people are reluctant to speak openly because of a difficult workplace culture, the resulting evidential weakness is not proof that the concern was invented. It may be one of the consequences of the very problem under scrutiny.

The voting analysis

The voting analysis in the ruling puzzles me, as it jars with the logic that underpins the Single Transferable Vote. The Certification Officer’s reasoning adopts UCU HQ’s line that the incumbent had a clear winning margin in the first round of voting, whereas the final margin was 182 votes in final preferences. In an STV election, movement between rounds is not background noise but the mechanism by which the result is produced. Later preferences and vote transfers are not a postscript to the “real” election, but part of the election itself. I do not think a first-round lead in a four-way competition is a convincing answer to concerns about impact in a close contest decided after transfers and final preferences.

The ruling also gives very little weight to what the evidence showed about how social media actually works during an election campaign. Visibility online is cumulative. Material is not only seen by those who follow the original account. It is shared onwards, quoted, reposted, discussed in branch and activist networks, and encountered repeatedly in ways that can shape perceptions of momentum, authority and incumbency.

Prior to the hearing, UCU had pressed that line in writing, arguing that the gap narrowed only later when the other candidates’ supporters’ later preferences were counted, and the reasoning in the ruling follows that line. Of course the Certification Officer was entitled to conclude that causation had not been established to the standard he required. My narrower point is that, in an STV election, a first-round lead cannot by itself answer concerns about impact in a close contest decided after transfers. The relevant margin was the final one, because that was the margin by which the election was actually won.

Democratic standards

What the limited remedy leaves open is the question of how UCU should uphold democratic standards in its own elections. Members should be able to trust that agreed election guidance will be treated as binding, and that shared union resources will not be used in ways that advantage one candidate over others. Concerns about fairness should be met seriously rather than managed away. It should also go without saying that no union should create workplace or organising conditions that leave people afraid to speak openly, whether to offer critique or ask questions, to raise concerns, or to ask for the justification for decisions about the use of resources.

At a time when post-16 education is in deep trouble, UCU cannot afford internal democratic arrangements that members do not trust. Our credibility in workplaces depends in part on members being able to trust our own internal processes.

It remains the case that UCU members should be able to expect better. We should be able to expect and trust that our union will uphold agreed democratic standards in our elections and our meetings, not as abstract principles invoked publicly but as standards that are visible in practice and that members can rely on internally. Trust can only be rebuilt if that is reflected in how rules are treated, how resources are used, and how concerns about fairness are heard and addressed. This is vital for the health of our internal democracy and for our credibility within our workplaces and the wider sector.