Two JNCs and a meeting to discuss next year’s budget: a significant shift

This week we had three meetings with management.

1. On Wednesday, two Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) meetings happened. The ‘policy JNC’ discussed Behaviour Matters, Supreme Court decision on the Equality Act, a proposed Equality Policy, and the Ill Health Retirement policy. UCU explained that precarious employment frequently caused unreported inappropriate behaviour and Behaviour Matters must recognise this. Regarding the Supreme Court decision, the employer contributed to the EHRC consultation in discussion with the staff Rainbow Network. No immediate policy changes are being proposed. Without an overarching Equality Policy, HR are proposing a disappointingly limited one. We questioned the inclusion of a reference to the guidance on protest, introduced without consultation in 2024. We welcomed the future offer to discuss the protest guidance document. The Ill Health Retirement policy will change at UCU’s request.  Updates to the Personal Relationships at Work policy have also been proposed, following new OfS guidance. Our equalities working group will discuss the proposed equality policy as well as the OfS guidance on relations feeding into our negotiating position.

2. The second was the ‘Reward JNC’. This covered the new employee benefit scheme (discounts at shops etc) and job evaluation (regrading in the professional service space). We pushed for an equality analysis of the job losses and promotion pause. [More detail on the gender, disability and ethnicity pay gaps arrive later in the annual cycle of pay gap reporting.]

3. Monday’s Budget Summary meeting confirms the impact of our action.

We met with the Chief Financial Officer and the Head of HR on Monday. They presented a five-page budget summary for 2025-26: a strictly confidential document so there are limits to what we can share. We can share what confirms what is already known and where this is in line with the settlement of our dispute. The document was a shortened version of what was presented to Council in June. There were both intellectual and material concession and confirmed our predictions about the university’s financial state-of-play. The long-term financial strategy remains relatively unchanged, but with a significant short-term revision to the (three-year) Medium-Term Forecast, presented to Council each year in November. The two principal targets remain growth and cash generation/income. We have been promised a further meeting in October.

i) Consideration of the potential hit to international postgraduate student numbers in the upcoming enrolment was upon a previous-year comparison rather than shortfall against budget targets. Budget-setting shortfall versus actual end-of-year deficit was a key part of our argument in consultations. [Consider the situation at Nottingham University where the new Castle Meadows medical school campus and a target of 3% growth are driving redundancies].

ii) Materially, what was shared regarding budget contingencies is an important sign of our dispute’s impact. They identify registration of international PGTs as the key risk to the budget. The employer has modelled to avoid redundancies as per our agreement even in significantly pessimistic scenarios.

iii) Capital spend in the near future is limited to existing commitments (e.g. Castle Leazes and IT network infrastructure). In addition, there may be sales of particular buildings in estate optimisation.

iv) There is a willingness to operate a deficit next year to cushion a potential blow from student enrolment.

v) Workforce re-sizing is at an end, but aspects of the transformation programme will continue including what they called ‘normal restructuring’.

In sum, then the budget summary indicates how our dispute has shifted the management and reveals their determination to avoid another round of redundancies next year. This was also clear from the body language in the room.

This does pose the question of the next steps for the branch, and a strategy to holding management to their promises, being included in decision making. It is clear that there is a sector wide crisis, and the goal of financial sustainability is an effort to square a circle in the medium term. Our dispute has provided a ‘blueprint’ (this is how the paperwork at NEC described it) to the rest of the union on how serious industrial action and an imaginative outward-looking campaign can win.

As a branch, we have two tasks.

Firstly, we need to make sure that we are not complacent. We were able to win because we were organised, with reps structures and a lively grassroots democratic culture of regular branch meetings as well as unit meetings, PS meetings, PGR and anticas meetings. Being alive to social movements and equality—migrant rights, trans rights, Palestine solidarity, anti-racism, disability rights—has also been crucial to engaging with the wider community and our students. We need to refresh that with new reps and in-house training to build capacity and confidence of our reps. Lots of good members have gone this year. Please volunteer to be a rep. In particular, workload is going to be a big health and safety issue so getting training in that is key. Please contact us on how to do that.

Secondly, the branch has become a beacon for other branches and networking to address the crisis in HE rather than relying on that being done by someone else. We should continue to do that work, but now with a focus on spreading solidarity and our insights into what works in terms of consultation, industrial action and political lobbying. Other branches are looking to us so we should not go back into our shell now ‘our’ dispute is over. Concretely, Loes is going to stand for NEC. We will be looking to continue to host networking and training events open to other branches. And of course, we will be inviting in branches in struggle as well as continuing to help other branches navigate their way through the legislation and union procedure to get to effective action.