Certification Officer 2025-26 report on UK trade unions
Most people do not spend their week reading a regulator's annual report, so let’s start with the simple version. The Certification Officer’s 2025-26 annual report, published on GOV.UK and laid before Parliament on 2 July 2026, sets out what the office did during 2025/26 and what the latest returns say about trade unions and employers’ associations for 2024-2025. If the title feels obscure, the job matters. The Certification Officer is the independent regulator for trade unions and employers’ associations, appointed by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. That means the office keeps official lists, receives annual returns and deals with certain complaints from union members.
One of the steadier findings in the report is also one of the easiest to follow. Three organisations were added to the list of trade unions, taking the total to 131, while the number of employers’ associations stayed at 36 with no change. **What this means:** these lists are not just paperwork. They show which organisations are formally recorded by the regulator, and that matters because the rest of the report - membership returns, financial data and compliance questions - depends on that official record.
The headline number is the one most readers will notice first: reported trade union membership fell by 19.4%, from 6.7 million in 2023-2024 to 5.4 million in 2024-2025. But the GOV.UK report itself tells you not to read that as a simple collapse in union membership. It says the fall mainly reflects the fact that Unite the Union supplied membership figures for 2023-2024 but did not provide its annual return of membership and financial information for 2024-2025. That context is important. A missing return can make the national picture look dramatically different, so this is a good reminder that a big percentage change does not always mean the same thing as a big real-world change.
The financial picture is more mixed than the membership figure suggests. Reported total assets of trade unions slipped by 1.3%, from £2.30 billion to £2.27 billion. At the same time, total funds reported by trade unions rose from £1.89 billion to £1.98 billion, an increase of 4.76%. If those figures feel slightly confusing, that is because they are different accounting measures rather than two ways of saying the same thing. The main point for readers is that the report does not show a single, simple story of financial decline across the board.
The section on political funds also needs a careful read. Of the 21 trade unions with political funds, 19 submitted annual returns with financial information. Across those 19 unions, the total held in political funds was £29.4 million, down 17.88% on the previous year, when 20 unions provided information. Political funds are money set aside for political purposes under union rules, so changes here can attract attention quickly. But once again, the number of unions reporting is part of the story. If one year includes returns from more organisations than another, the comparison needs to be handled with care.
The complaints figures show a much busier year for the regulator. The Certification Officer dealt with 46 complaints from members against their trade unions, compared with 13 the year before. Two were withdrawn and four were struck out. Of the 40 complaints that reached a hearing, seven were upheld and 33 were dismissed, with two enforcement orders made by the Certification Officer. The report also records one financial penalty order in a case where a union member was not given access to the union’s accounting records. **What this means:** a rise in complaints does not automatically prove every union is performing worse, but it does show that more disputes reached the regulator and needed formal decisions.
The biggest legal shift in the report comes from the Employment Rights Act 2025. During the reporting year, its amendments took effect and reversed parts of the Trade Union Act 2016, returning the Certification Officer to the position that applied before those 2016 changes. In practice, that means unions no longer have to include information on industrial action and the extra detailed political spending data that had been required in annual returns. It also means the Certification Officer no longer has the added power to investigate some non-compliance issues without first receiving a member’s complaint, and no longer has the power to raise an annual levy on listed trade unions and employers’ associations to cover the office’s costs. In other words, the role has moved back towards a more complaint-led model.
There was another change to political funds as well. For unions that have them, the law now restores the earlier default so new members can be treated as contributing unless they opt out. That may sound technical, but default settings matter because they shape what happens when a member takes no action. One final detail helps place the report in time. Stephen Hardy is the current Certification Officer, appointed on 1 October 2025. He followed Sarah Bedwell, who held the post from 2017 until her retirement on 31 May 2025, with Michael Kidd serving as interim Certification Officer from 1 June 2025 to 30 September 2025. **How to read the numbers well:** every figure in the report comes from annual returns received during the reporting year, so the strongest reading is one that checks who filed, who did not, what the law required at the time and what powers the regulator actually had.