Unlike my old classmate Chris Cox, director of legal services at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), I was delighted with the president’s response to the Damages-Based Agreements Regulations (DBAs) (see [2010] Gazette, 15 April, 11). At last there was official recognition of the true position of the unions on equal pay and DBAs.

The unions have been incredibly good at passing motions and attending conferences on equal pay, but terrible in taking effective action, especially in the public sector. If the president was implying that the unions have failed to do justice to their members’ employment rights then he was spot on – that is precisely the position. The RCN itself had, until just last year, a policy of not pursuing equal pay cases in the NHS. All the public sector unions signed a moratorium with local government employers agreeing not to pursue equal pay cases on behalf of their members. This position only changed as a direct result of the work that my firm did in pursuing cases on a DBA basis.

Mr Cox claims that the unions have supported hundreds of thousands of cases, but the truth is that they would never have supported or pursued these cases if it had not been as a result of our actions using DBAs. Until 2003, equal pay cases made up less than 1% of all tribunal claims. As a result of our work, equal pay became the number one type of claim – a remarkable turnaround that would never have happened if the unions had been left to their own devices.

Ask union members in Middlesbrough, Newcastle or Glasgow whether the unions got them justice over their employment rights. I have thousands of clients who have got substantially more (even after our fees) than their colleagues did through the unions.

As for Mr Cox’s claim that almost all advances in equal pay have been through union-backed cases, this is nonsense. It ignores the role of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the European Court of Human Rights. Nine out of 10 reported equal pay cases in the past decade have not been union cases at all, but cases my firm has pursued.

The reality is that unions hate competition and will do anything to snuff it out. This is why they lobbied government so that funding of equal pay settlements would only be provided to councils on the condition that money was not paid to solicitors acting on a DBA basis. It is why trade union lawyers were the only ones to oppose the Employment Lawyers Association response to the DBA regulations. It is why the union firms oppose the Jackson civil ligation proposals in England and Wales.

The unions have done some fantastic work for their members, but the effective monopoly they seek in claimant work is clearly not in the public interest and not in their members’ interests.

Stefan Cross, Director, Stefan Cross Solicitors Ltd, Newcastle upon Tyne