HOW many union general secretaries have gone on the road with the Bay City Rollers?

Ten points and a VIP ticket to the next local government pay negotiations if you get the right answer: none, to the Star’s knowledge at least.

But that may be about to change. Heather Wakefield, Unison’s head of local government and now challenging general secretary Dave Prentis for the top job, worked in a past life as a journalist on rock monthly Beat Instrumental.

The job, in which she also interviewed Joan Armatrading and Barry White, is just one demonstration of how Wakefield’s life goes beyond the labour movement.

After growing up in a council house in Reading, Wakefield threw herself into causes such as the National Abortion Campaign and the women’s refuge in Newcastle, where she was studying for a degree.

Fighting the cause of women has been a running theme in Wakefield’s journey. In the early 1990s she co-authored a pamphlet with current TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady on the difficulties faced by mothers returning to work.

“Frances and I had both had our own children,” she explains to me when we meet. “We thought it was important to get out the message about how women’s role in the home related to workplace issues.”

Now she is seeking to be the first female general secretary of a union whose membership is 76 per cent female. And though Unison has “led the way” with reserved women’s places on committees, this has too often been “seen as an end in itself,” Wakefield says.

“Women in Unison are seen as an oppressed group, whereas actually we’re the majority,” she says. “Women shouldn’t have to self-organise in special groups to get themselves heard.”

And amplifying women’s voices can only make the union more effective, Wakefield argues. “In order to mobilise our members, you have to mobilise women. None of our campaigning and policy work keys into issues that particularly affect women.”

She is promising a “big development programme” to “mobilise, empower and develop women within Unison.”

For whoever is elected after polls close in December, rebuilding momentum among demoralised activists will surely be a high mountain to climb. Unison lost around 90,000 members between 2010 and 2014 as jobs were cut across the public sector.

Members in local government have been hit particularly hard. Many councils have had their budgets slashed by half under David Cameron, and the sector now faces an additional £10 billion of cuts by 2020.

When — following successive pay freezes — council workers were offered just a 1 per cent increase in 2014, industrial strife seemed inevitable.

But when Unison’s leadership called off strike action to ballot on an improved offer of 2.35 per cent, the ranks divided. Membership ballots in Unison — along with Unite and the GMB — voted to accept the offer.

But Prentis was criticised by some activists for negotiating the deal with Labour leaders on the Local Government Association and cutting out other officials.

At special conference earlier this year, lay activists succeeded in getting the union to re-submit a pay claim for 2015/16 — in spite of reps having signed up to a two-year deal.

Officials have admitted that getting workers out on strike over the issue was a struggle — especially in regions where membership density is low.

But unions’ resistance to local government austerity has been undermined by politicians’ acceptance of cuts, Wakefield says.

“Labour councils tried to manage the cuts and keep going,” she said. “One very basic thing Labour councils should have done was speak out and argue for an alternative — but of course Labour nationally wasn’t doing that.”

It’s by doing exactly this, she adds, that Jeremy Corbyn has become so popular. Wakefield is hopeful for a Corbyn-led Labour, but warns that his election as party leader alone won’t solve the crisis facing working Brits. “People will have to have patience,” she says.

But Labour should not be the be-all and end-all of Unison’s political strategy. “I don’t think we have a coherent political strategy,” she confesses. “We need to be more pluralistic — we have to talk to the Greens, to the SNP.

“A big plank of Jeremy’s push has been to build a movement — which is exactly what Labour hasn’t done. We need to build that movement within Unison.”

Wakefield is keen to stress her track record as a lay activist in Unison’s predecessor Nalgo, in which she represented social workers.

But it was another, more personal experience, that made her a fighter. “My mother died when I was at uni, and I had two younger siblings. The council wanted to put them in a home, and I had to fight to keep the flat.”

She was successful, and her godmother took charge while Wakefield finished her degree, after which she moved back home.

It was also in her mother, a school cleaner, that the young Wakefield first saw the dedication of public-sector workers. “There were all kinds of crises, but nobody ever asked her to join a union,” she sighs.

Wakefield promises to rejig union resources to focus on “supporting activists, bargaining and campaigning.” In this her campaign has something in common with the other challengers, Barnet branch secretary John Burgess, Southampton secretary Hayley Garner and NEC member Roger Bannister.

She also says the union structures “don’t reflect” that around 200,000 of its members are now working for private contractors.

Under Prentis, Unison has faced criticism for using members transferred from local to central government to win general Civil Service recognition, allowing it to recruit in fields represented by oher unions.

In May, PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said Unison “went behind our back, directly to Francis Maude, at a time when the government had launched a vicious attack on trade unions, and got recognition.”

Wakefield highlights the need to “build solidarity with other public-sector unions” because the government has attempted to “destroy” trade unionism in the civil service.

“We all need to stand together,” she says determinedly.