UCU Action Committee
To plan & organise pickets, events & campaigns
Friday 21st February 14:00
https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/88687176029
Meeting ID: 886 8717 6029
Emergency General Meeting for Monday 24th February at 1pm:
https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/85335760488
Meeting ID: 853 3576 0488
Passcode: 022039
What’s our strategy?
So far we have been one step ahead of our management in our challenge to the cuts. We predicted the crisis, we predicted the compulsory redundancies, we had sufficient foresight to get the long process of ballot authorisation and industrial action in train for the next phase of consultation over redundancy in March. We have to make our strike count. The first day of action will be the focus of national press attention. Our picket lines and rally will be massive.
Thanks to you, the negotiators will have more leverage than branches at most universities. We are spreading the resistance to elsewhere and doing all we can to put university cuts onto the political agenda, with some considerable success in terms of press coverage and resonance for other branches.
Our press campaign has been remarkable in terms of coverage. This ramps up the pressure upon the VC who as Russell Group Chair is making us a test case in a model of shock-therapy job cuts followed by post-trauma restructure. We plan to use strike days and a no-confidence campaign to intensify this pressure. They have lost hearts and minds amongst staff. Their flat-footed press responses look hollow and corporate.
We have produced an open letter to Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education and this was adopted by Northern Region UCU. It now has over 1000 signatories.
The HE funding model is not sustainable. Our strike has national press attention. We are pushing UCU from below into action over the cuts. We have produced an evidence-based briefing on how to lobby your MP.
We have reached out to the students with several meetings with the Students’ Union (SU) and the establishment of a student-staff solidarity group. We have a PowerPoint slide to explain the dispute to your students and student facing posters and leaflets. The SU will run a poll of students about support for the strikes. Student support will be crucial to exerting pressure upon UEB. Strike days create the space for staff-student mobilisation over the crisis in Higher Education funding.
Within the branch, we have built reps structures and participatory habits of meetings at the grassroots: school or unit meetings, PGR and anti-casualisation meetings, PS meetings, migrant member meetings. This energy allows us to have large branch meetings, to get through ballot threshold and to take serious industrial action. We are a model of how to build one big union that management have to take seriously.
The University’s Finances: Why do we need industrial action?
- 43% of our major income stream student tuition fees is high risk international student market.
- The loss of roughly 1000 international PGTs put an ‘unexpected’ £30m dent in budgets.
- The budget had planned for £70m capital spend.
A branch meeting of 180 members decided strike days on Tuesday. On Friday the union notified the employer. The action is substantial and will provide considerable to resolve the dispute that we declared over jobs, workload and equality. Last Wednesday, we had the second consultation meeting with management that I summarised in a Friday update.
Financial details were only handed over last Thursday. We have been pushing for financial information since the first round of VS last February. First invoking the obligations of the employer under ACAS code of practice. UEB were again asked to share financial details when the austerity measures were announced. Members demanded this information again in the motion declaring dispute in October. When the notice of redundancies was given to unions, financial details were yet again requested under trade union and redundancy law. The executive finally released them last week.
So, some (but not all) of the financial information that we have been long been asking for arrived on Thursday, but with a ‘strict-confidentiality’ embargo on it. We have pushed back on our ability to consult with our members on this information. The management have now accepted this in principle. That this is late in the day means that any union counter-proposal is constrained within a revised annual budget that is now into its third quarter. We will be doing more work on this in our union working group on finance. However, here is a preliminary outline of the situation.
What we did not know and what we have been pressing for insistently, is the nature of the university’s financial situation consequent upon the international tuition-fee decline:
- Is there a cash-centred threat of a liquidity crisis with the possibility of the institution failing?
- Or is this an shock to the system and the need to recalibrate major budget items, with much more latitude for action?
Cash matters. It will be the route that the widely-predicted and unimaginable event will happen: A university will fail and need a bailout. At the outset of the redundancy consultation, the VC stated the university has a strong cash position and good borrowing profile. Reading the books, that is the case. In terms of the threat of liquidity, there is no financial grounds for the pain of job loss and redundancy. The annual arc of cash balances is not, in my view, a serious threat. No real chance of needing to report to the OfS only 30 ‘liquidity days’, or even 90 days (Charity Commission advice). I would even go so far to say that there never was, and that the emergency measures of September were an overreaction. But that is moot. This is not to say that Newcastle or elsewhere will not be in this situation next year or the year after.
We are in the scenario where the drop in international students was a profound shock (albeit one predicted by all but university executives) with the drop in expected revenue of roughly £30m. A lot of money, but Newcastle University has an annual turnover of over £650m. How to deal with this is a choice. Chasing the international fees bubble was the logic proposed in the Price Waterhouse Cooper’s January 2024 report for UUK (and the reason for the mess that we are in). All VCs followed the same strategy: Hold down staff costs, maintain capital spend, cross-subsidise with international student growth. Put simply, university executives across the sector followed suit on the advice of PwC, choosing to ignore loud warnings from national union of students, trade unions, OfS, and many others.
This led to a scramble for a diminishing market for international students. Budgets were set assuming international student growth, so massive budget shortfalls came as a predictable result. Shortfalls are not the same as deficits. Our management have exposed 43% of our major income stream—tuition fees—to the international market and deemed this high-risk gamble ‘prudent’. Worse is to come unless we do something about it. Now the competition for international students will intensify with price-cutting and lower returns. Phase two is further job cuts already and this assumes flat international student recruitment. More fantasy planning on a broken strategy.
The 2024-25 budget has been replaced with budgetary forecasts based on the first quarter.
So big budget items need a reshuffle. September’s painful and demoralising emergency measures in which the most precarious were hit hardest were largely a measure to sure up the cash position. The logic that UEB employed was this which is there in the consultation pack and the Town Halls. The staff cost-to-income ratio is the obsessive starting point. 57%. What about the other 43%? What does a focus on staff costs distract from? What other big items could be moved around? The budget this year allocated more to capital spend than last year’s £43m. Despite the acknowledgement that HE funding was in crisis. The lack of planning permission for Castle Leazes dented the projected spend. This was announced as a five-year £250m joint venture commitment. So staff-cost-to-income ratio is the problem if you prioritise property-development-and-landlordism. And though, there is no mention of an India campus in the extracted documents that the unions were provided with clearly with recent announcements this is a global ambition. Cut capital spend. Why go back to 2020 staff numbers if you can go back to 2010 capital spend without destroying careers and lives?
The financial information requests have changed our understanding of the situation. We had been asking and receiving information about particular capital projects and about covenants on borrowing. We were provided with information on these projects and some of it was in the public domain.
In the short term it is the overall scale of capital spend that is the real issue. Not a single redundancy is necessary.
Fat cat pay is a problem because it is symptomatic of the loss of professional control—the self-governance aspect of any understanding of academic freedom—needed within a university. The £3m wage bill of UEB would also go some considerable way to avoiding the threatened redundancies. The decision-making that is the bigger issue. With hundreds of jobs going, careers ending, workloads in chaos, this is existential. This is about the future of our university, of Higher Education in the UK.