New ACAS Chair
Sir Brendan Barber has been announced as the new Chair of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) Council.
Sir Brendan is currently a member of the Board of Transport for London and a member of the Council of City University London, graduating with a BSc in Social Sciences in 1974. His career has been almost exclusively within the TUC having first joined the TUC in 1975 and held a number of posts in the TUC Organisation, and Press and Information Departments, before serving as Deputy General Secretary from 1993 until his election as General Secretary where he served from 2003 to 2012.
Brendan played a lead role in TUC initiatives to promote union organising, oversaw the launch of the TUC’s highly successful learning and skills operation, Unionlearn and played a crucial role in assisting unions and employers to resolve a number of difficult long running disputes. He led the organisation of the huge half a million strong March for the Alternative in March 2011 and co-ordinated the negotiations and industrial action over public service pensions on 30 November 2011 which saw two million people in 30 unions support their unions’ campaigns for pensions fairness.
Additionally, he sat on the Acas Council from 1995 to 2004, the Board of Sport England from 1999 to 2003 and the Court of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2012. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Said Business School, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.
In 2007 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the City University and Sir Brendan was knighted in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to employment relations.
Sir Brendan Barber said:
“I am very pleased to be taking on this role. Acas has played a crucial role over many years promoting best practice in employment relations and helping to resolve countless seemingly intractable workplace disputes. Its work will be particularly important to meeting the challenge of building a genuine sustainable recovery with fairness at work at its heart.”
Sir Brendan will start in the New Year and will serve a three year term.
