Public and Commercial Services Union

The 'Make Your Vote Count' (MYVC) campaign has been run by PCS in elections since 2007 and provides a means whereby our members can exert pressure on candidates seeking political office in relation to the union's key concerns, such as jobs, pay and privatisation, as well as playing a part in our campaign against the far right.

The Make Your Vote Count campaign challenges your representatives and asks them to make a stand for public services. Image: Gillian Blease.

In the 2007 Welsh Assembly elections, our members questioned 60 candidates about their views and won support from all the major parties for our opposition to regional pay. In the 2008 local elections, we questioned 73 candidates standing for Welsh councils, the vast majority of whom were supportive of the union's views.

Make Your Vote Count 2010

The recent general election campaign has been the most important opportunity yet for our Make Your Vote Count campaign, as the politicians elected will have a direct say over the departments and agencies which employ a majority of PCS members. We therefore aimed to involve as many people as possible in this year's campaign.

We asked every candidate standing in the general election, excluding far right parties, to support our five pledges. They are:

1. I pledge to work to ensure that public services are properly resourced and delivered by the public sector and that there are no further local office closures, public sector job cuts or privatisations.
2. I pledge to support measures aimed at closing the UK tax gap, including recruiting HMRC staff and ensuring tax loopholes are closed.
3. I pledge to support civil service national pay bargaining and to press the government to offer pay increases to public sector workers at least in line with inflation.
4. I pledge to urge the government to honour the 2005 commitment on public sector pensions and to defend the rights of existing members of the civil service compensation scheme.
5. I pledge to campaign to ensure any changes to public services are only made after proper equality impact assessments have been conducted and their findings implemented.

Forty parliamentary constituencies have been contested in Wales. Most of these contain several hundred PCS members, many of whom and contacted the candidates standing in their area to ask them to sign up to our five pledges. 

In both Cardiff and Wrexham, we also invited candidates to attend a question time meeting, so that our members could grill them on the issues of concern to them, before deciding who to vote for.

PCS branches across Wales elected or appointed MYVC campaign co-ordinators,  identifying key local issues for us to highlight in the campaign (e.g. job cuts, office closures, relocation, pay, privatisation, cuts in public services), monitoring local activity by the racist British National Party (BNP) and collecting contact details for members who wanted to be involved in the campaign.

By encouraging every member of PCS, as well as our friends and families, to register to vote and to take part - we can maximise our union’s influence, help to elect politicians who value and support public services, and stop the growth in electoral support for the BNP.

For information about MYVC, please email Darren Williams - darrenw@pcs.org.uk or Siân Boyles - sianbo@pcs.org.uk or call 02920 666363.