The campaign is being made available to the public as the messaging is going out on social media in addition to direct communication with members.
Purpose test:
Call to action to voters
There is no call to action for voters. The call to action is to members of the union to vote yes to strike action in the industrial action ballot.
At the time of the ballot, there was no date for the next election for voters to be influenced in. However, even if there had been an election at the time, the call to action would still have been to members of the union to vote yes to strike action, and not to vote in any particular way in the election.
Tone
The future of the NHS is a matter of public debate, with all parties putting forward competing plans to improve the NHS. The union has strongly held views rooted in the experiences of their members, which they express clearly.
Context and timing
The union has campaigned about NHS pay and funding for decades, and it is the core job of the union to represent its members’ views on pay and conditions, which includes workload and the proper funding of NHS services. The industrial action ballot necessarily uses the language of voting, so in retrospect there could be a perceived link to the election and voting. However, the references to voting and ballots are clearly about strike action. And in any case, at the time of the ballot, there was no election scheduled.
How a reasonable person would see the activity
A reasonable person would consider that the intention of the activity was to influence members of the union to vote yes in the industrial action ballot. They would not think the intention of the activity was to influence voters to vote against the government party, as the material was clearly related to an industrial action ballot in the NHS.
Even if there had been an election at the time, a reasonable person would still have thought that the intention was to influence the outcome of the strike ballot, rather than voters in the election.
Taking all of these factors into account, the activity cannot reasonably be regarded as intended to influence voters to vote for or against a political party, so the purpose test is not met. Spending on the activity is therefore not regulated.