Ah, well I can understand that view, but unions can sometimes be useful! When I was a H&S rep I went on a 1-day x 10 weeks Stage 1 course put on by the regional TUC, since my employers wouldn't arrange any training of their own. That was quite interesting since I worked in a bog-standard railway office environment and other people on the course included a hospital radiographer and a H&S rep in an oil refinery, which ensured a wide range of points of view of what H&S involved! You're entitled to "reasonable time off" to attend training courses, a notice board in your workplace, and adequate communications and storage facilities for your documentation, which might be interpreted as an office with a phone, but in my case was half a lockable filing cabinet. You should probably pay a visit to your nearest branch of HMSO or whatever they're called these days, and take a look at what they stock in the H&S area - one particularly useful brown book, about 3" high and 7" wide describes the rights and responsibilities of H&S reps, but I'm damned if I can remember what it's called (it was about 10 years ago now...).