Certification Officer 2025-26 report on UK union rules
Most people will never hear about the Certification Officer until a report like this lands in Parliament. But the office is the UK’s independent regulator for trade unions, so if you want to understand how unions are supervised in law, it matters. It keeps the official lists of trade unions and employers’ associations, checks annual returns and deals with certain complaints from union members. According to the Certification Officer’s annual report, laid before Parliament on 2 July 2026, the office’s latest work covers 2025/26 and includes statistics drawn from annual returns for 2024/25. What this means is simple: the report is partly about the regulator’s work this year and partly about the membership and financial information organisations reported for the previous year.
One of the clearest jobs the office carries out is keeping the official register. This year, three organisations were added to the list of trade unions, taking the total number of listed trade unions to 131. The number of employers’ associations did not change and stayed at 36. That may sound administrative, but it is worth pausing on. These lists help decide which organisations are formally recognised in this part of the law. So even before you get to the headline figures, the report is showing you how the state keeps track of organised labour and employer bodies.
The membership figures need careful reading. The report records a 19.4% fall in reported trade union membership, from 6.7 million in 2023/24 to 5.4 million in 2024/25. On its own, that looks dramatic. But the Certification Officer’s report says the drop was mainly because Unite the Union provided membership figures for 2023/24 and did not provide its annual return of membership and financial information for 2024/25. So if you are trying to read this as a big national shift in union strength, it is wiser to slow down. This is a reminder that statistics can change sharply when one very large organisation is missing from the return.
The financial picture is mixed rather than alarming. Reported total assets of trade unions fell slightly, from £2.30 billion to £2.27 billion, which is a 1.3% decrease. At the same time, total funds reported by trade unions rose from £1.89 billion to £1.98 billion, an increase of 4.76%. For general readers, this is a good example of why financial reporting rarely gives you one neat story. One measure went down, another went up, and both are part of the same report. The useful lesson here is not to chase a single headline number, but to look at what each figure is actually measuring.
The report also covers political funds, which some trade unions hold for lawful political purposes. Out of the 21 trade unions with political funds, 19 submitted annual returns with financial information. Those 19 reported a combined £29.4 million in their political funds, down 17.88% compared with the previous year, when 20 unions provided information. Again, context matters. Because the number of unions reporting was not identical across the two years, the comparison tells you what was reported, not a perfectly like-for-like change in political activity. If you are learning to read public data well, this is exactly the sort of detail you should keep in view.
The sharpest movement in the report is in complaints from union members. The Certification Officer dealt with 46 complaints from members against their trade unions, compared with 13 in the previous year. Two complaints were withdrawn and four were struck out. Of the 40 complaints that went forward to a hearing, seven were upheld and 33 were dismissed, with two enforcement orders made. The report also records one financial penalty order after a member complained that his trade union had not given him access to the union’s accounting records. What this means for you is that the office is not only collecting paperwork. It can hear disputes, make findings and, in some cases, issue penalties and enforcement orders.
The biggest rule change in the reporting year came from the Employment Rights Act 2025. According to the report, the Act restored the Certification Officer’s powers to the position that existed before the Trade Union Act 2016. In plain English, trade unions no longer have to include information on industrial action and more detailed political spending in their annual returns, the Certification Officer no longer has the wider post-2016 powers to investigate certain issues without first receiving a member’s complaint, and the office can no longer raise an annual levy on listed unions and employers’ associations to cover the costs of its work. For unions with political funds, the law has also moved back to the earlier system for new members. New members can now be treated as contributing to the political fund unless they choose to opt out, rather than being required to opt in first. If you are studying how laws shape institutions, this is a clear example of one Act reversing parts of an earlier one and changing both what regulators can do and what organisations must report.
The report also marks a change in who holds the post. Stephen Hardy is the current Certification Officer and was appointed on 1 October 2025 by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. He followed Sarah Bedwell, who served until her retirement on 31 May 2025, with Michael Kidd holding the role on an interim basis from 1 June 2025 to 30 September 2025. Taken together, this is not really a story about Westminster drama. It is a story about the quiet rules that shape working life. The Certification Officer’s annual report shows who is on the official register, what unions reported about membership and money, how member complaints were handled and how the Employment Rights Act 2025 has changed the rulebook. If you wanted the plain-English version, that is the part that matters most.