redundancies – UCU Left

2 December 202522 December 2025

After the HE ballot results – what next?

The Higher Education ballot results are out.

Despite hard and consistent work by reps and activists in branches, and a campaign from HQ, unfortunately we failed to get over the 50% threshold.

The right in the union are already arguing that it was a mistake to ballot members. Their constant refrain is that it’s the wrong time to ballot, and that the union should concentrate on local fights over jobs rather than building a UK-wide fightback.

This is the position of members of HEC belonging to the Commons and IBL factions who stopped the union reballoting during the 2023 MAB. Having failed to lead the union when they had the mandate, they blame the members, the left – indeed anyone but themselves – for not mobilising successfully now.

How should we interpret this result?

It’s good that 40% of members did participate in the vote – but why did the campaign fail to cross the 50% threshold?

The central problem is that many UCU members, including dedicated union reps, don’t believe that our leadership is willing to lead a serious fight. This is borne out by people questioning the industrial action strategy. The gap between the 70% vote for strike and 83% vote for ASOS may also reflect this.

But this belief is also based on experience of recent disputes.

Branches fighting job losses have been left to fight alone. There has been no attempt to link up the disputes that have won – like Dundee and Newcastle – with those that are striking or balloting here and now. Nor has there been any central effort to build solidarity with branches in the middle of the fight. Restrictions on accessing the Fighting Fund mean branches taking strike action have had to issue public calls to branches for financial support alongside the usual solidarity.

Secondly, UCU central messaging failed to set out the case for the dispute except in general terms. Members reasonably asked ‘what national agreements are under threat?’, ‘what would a national agreement on jobs look like?’ and ‘is the pay claim affordable?’ Multiple branches, such as Durham, took the initiative. There were lively campaigns by branches and reps on social media. A rank and file group tried to pin down the demands. The UCU Solidarity Movement enumerated 10 reasons to vote Yes.

But compared to this, the central campaign was very weak.

The ongoing – and utterly shameful – failure to resolve the dispute with UCU Unite staff has been another big negative factor. And many activists across the UK are still angry at the betrayal of the 2023 MAB campaign over two years ago – and in some cases, are still recovering from the financial hardship they endured.

What next?

So what are the prospects for members, reps and branches in resisting a further cycle of cuts? How can we defend our sector and ourselves?

The employers are not going to sit back. Indeed they may increase the attacks on branches. Northumbria and Southampton Solent are testing the water to see how the union responds to a brazen assault on TPS pension membership. Other employers may think now is the chance to demand job losses.

There are several arguments that won’t go away.

#1: The sector could afford pay and jobs – if employers cut other expenditure

The affordability argument is pushed by the employers’ organisations UCEA and UUK. They say the cupboard is bare, and that the value of student tuition fees have fallen so low that redundancies and pay cuts are inevitable.

To add insult to injury, they say staff should take a real terms pay cut of 3% on top of job losses of 10-15,000 a year, with uncounted losses of casualised workers.

Worse still, left to their own devices, a recent report says the employers will continue this cycle of cuts annually.

What is happening to university expenditure?

Figure 1. Expenditure of UK HEIs over time (all) £ millions (source: HESA). *Staff costs are corrected for FRS-102 adjustment.

Note: HESA data adjusts ‘staff costs’ by the FRS-102 accounting method. Thanks to major changes in USS pension liabilities, these ‘costs’ have fluctuated widely in the last few years. An early version of this blog post incorrectly quoted uncorrected HESA data.

These inclines appear quite steep, but become flat or even fall once inflation is taken out. Universities were still expanding over this period. Staff and student numbers in the sector have grown.

Figure 2. Expenditure headings over time (Fig 1), adjusted for inflation (RPI). Source: ONS/Statista.

What is covered by “other operating costs”? This is a catch-all category, but the greatest proportion is capital expenditure. Employers are continuing to invest in new buildings, campuses, medical schools, etc. This expenditure has grown since 2014, when the cap on student numbers was lifted, triggering a “war of all against all.”

This is why it is right to say the money is there. We do not face a “choice” between pay and jobs – the employers are taking both. And the answer is the same – cut the capex! Whenever the employer is announcing redundancy programmes we must first insist on opening the books and stop sacking staff to pay for new campuses.

And if that won’t solve the problem, we need to put pressure on the government to demand a bailout.

#2: Governments can be made to bail out universities

This data is an average. Not all universities are in the same position.

Redundancies should be the last resort.

Employers are not powerless victims. Despite the headlines, most universities are making surpluses, and some are engaged in substantial capital expenditure projects. Others are restructuring, hiring more staff while making others redundant. Employers have considerable flexibility about what they choose to spend their money on!
Employers are feigning memory loss. Those that accumulated large surpluses in the past now want to forget them and focus on this year’s deficit. The average surplus across UK HE over the last decade was 3.23% of income. Wales is the exception, with an average surplus of just 0.61%.
Universities have reserves. These past surpluses are unspent income. They are not ‘operating surpluses’ – these sums have been banked. Universities have reserves, although the scale of reserves varies massively across the sector.

Some universities, like Dundee and Hull, have a structural deficit, and need a government bailout. Others, like Goldsmiths and Sheffield Hallam, are hovering around the break-even point. But the evidence of the last few years is that redundancy programmes don’t cure deficits, because they also drive students away.

So we need a strategy to defend jobs and the sector, and expose what is going on.

What Dundee UCU did should be a model for other branches to follow.

In the first round, the branch took their fight to the Scottish Parliament, and convinced them to back a bailout to protect jobs.

When their employer’s new Interim Principal decided to renege on the agreement from last year and sought to make cuts, Dundee UCU were forced to reballot.

They struck again last week, and succeeded in getting a clear statement from the Scottish Government that the £40m bailout must be spent on keeping jobs not paying staff redundancy payments:

“It is Scottish Government’s clear instruction that until such a strategy (referred to above and in the Conditions of Funding as the Strategy To Recovery) has been developed and approved by Court there should be no new proposals for additional compulsory staff reductions.”

This is an amazing victory: a ‘Made in Dagenham’ moment.

Education is a public good, and universities in towns and cities like Dundee are key employers, they cannot be allowed to fail. The combination of strikes and a political campaign over defending jobs show that it is possible to force governments to bail out universities and hold VCs to pledges not to make redundancies.

But for every Dundee there are several other branches that have been less successful.

#3: We need to take the fight to Parliament

Local fightbacks are not enough. A union that only fights locally is bound to lose. We risk the entrenchment of unequal terms and conditions: the strongest branches may do ok, others will lose out again and again. Many members see the national union effectively silent and failing to lead. The result is an understandable demoralisation.

We need to force Higher Education up the political priorities of governments – and of the UK Parliament in particular. At the moment, Vice Chancellors and UUK are being heard in the press and Parliament. UCU and the other unions are ignored. It is barely surprising if many members don’t believe that UCU has a national strategy!

A UK-wide strike is the best way to turn up the pressure, but we don’t need to wait to organise lobbies. This November, a small group of UCU reps in Further and Adult Education organised a lobby of Parliament in London which had over 300 in attendance. Students joined to support the fight for their education. Sensing the way the wind was blowing, several employers gave the green light for staff and students to attend.

UCU could call a series of actions building up to coordinated national lobbies of all four Parliaments in the New Year, and build action towards elections in May.

#4: We need to support local strikes over jobs

At the same time, we must redouble our support for branches resisting the jobs massacre. Branches should invite speakers from branches planning to take action. Donations matter!

Solidarity should not be left to local reps to organise. UCU head office could do a lot more to support branches taking industrial action to resist job cuts.

Examples include:

Extend strike pay so that action need not end too soon (and the employer knows they can’t starve staff back to work)
Organise regions to build solidarity for branches fighting back, including local demos, fundraising events, etc
Organise speaking tours for reps from branches that have run successful disputes, to share ideas
Organise lobbies of key politicians and parties, advertising them publicly to members, and putting on transport

#5: We need to rebuild the campaign, and reballot members on a UK-wide basis

If we are going to get high turnouts in future ballots in HE, we need an honest discussion about what went right and what went wrong with the ballot we have just had.

UCU should call a HESC not just a swift BDM, so that there is an opportunity to debate motions rather than just give 90-second reports from a limited number of branches, and for delegates to decide on next steps in the dispute.

There should be no attempt to stifle criticism of the UCU leadership – we can’t do things better if we don’t know (or daren’t discuss) what went wrong.

We will need to reballot members.

Finally, there is one further factor. Labour’s Employment Rights Bill, despite being watered down, is wending its way through Parliament.

If it passes, then the 50% ballot threshold will be abolished.

This won’t change the importance of winning members to taking action. We will still need to campaign to win a ballot. But it will abolish the undemocratic veto, where a group of members actively not voting can stop a strike.

Hold leaders to account in the elections

We can’t just complain about “the leadership” if we don’t seek to change or influence it. This year’s elections for half of the NEC run in February. Due to a resignation, the election for Vice President from HE and FE are being run at the same time.

This is a unique opportunity to reconfigure UCU’s national officers, to build a dynamic team directing strategy for members. UCU Left have strong and experienced candidates running for VP of HE, Sean Wallis, and VP of FE, Regi Pilling. UCU Left will be running candidates for a large number of seats, alongside a number of independents we regularly work with.

For a more coherent national strategy across post-16 education, we encourage all colleagues to join the campaign to boost turnout to ensure we get a strong left leadership elected.

25 July 202526 July 2025

Newcastle and Dundee – How to Win in a Crisis

A Crisis in the Making

The Market Experiment in UK Higher Education visibly began to collapse in 2024-25, with a series of universities reporting shortfalls and deficits of the order of tens of millions of pounds amid reports from forecasting bodies identifying evidence of sector-wide structural deficits.^[i] Reports of tens of thousands of job cuts taking place in 2024-25 and 2025-26 were forecast by activists, and the danger of universities becoming insolvent and destabilising the whole sector was widely recognised.^[ii]

The crisis within UK HE is rooted in the ending of opportunities for expansion underpinned by student tuition fees from home and international students. The experiment began in 1998 with the first introduction of £1,000 undergraduate tuition fees, extended in 2006 to £3,000 and then turbocharged, first with the rise of English tuition fees to £9,000 in 2011 and finally, the lifting of the cap on home student recruitment in 2014. Differences across UK nations for home tuition fees did not lead to alternative HE funding models, instead, the tendency was towards intensified competition for student fees in what was referred to as ‘unregulated markets’, i.e. taught postgraduate programmes and overseas student fees.^[iii]

The UK Higher Education system adopted an ideology of free market competition and its accompanying language. Universities were now ‘higher education providers’, they ‘competed’, students were ‘customers’, and quality was associated with fee levels. Of course, as with free market ideology itself, internal contradictions were obvious from the beginning. UK Higher Education was a price-fixing cartel in which student fees were set by employers’ organisations at the maximum available, international fees were benchmarked to providers with similar international rankings, and prices for student services, most obviously accommodation, were set by the maximum loans students could access through the living costs component of student loans.

The race was on to expand to maximise surpluses and market share for individual providers, and this required the rapid growth of major capital projects, new campuses, and buildings springing up across university campuses throughout the UK.

As with other markets in capitalism, this proved to be a major source of the crisis emerging in 2024. Capital expansion and interest payments funded by ever-rising surpluses in the sector unravelled when tuition fee income fell. The unwillingness of government to increase student tuition fee loans in line with inflation resulted in a declining profitability in the UK student tuition fee market. Racist immigration policies pursued by UK governments, coupled with financial crises in developing economies responsible for the largest numbers of international students and the growth of domestic alternatives led to a downturn in overseas student applications, and a squeeze on the international tuition fee market. Mainstream economists would call this a crisis of profitability. Marxists would recognise this as an example of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.

The Employers’ Response to the Crisis

Employers turned to a uniform set of explanations as a focus for the crisis. Contingent explanations were provided, such as the fall in international student numbers across the UK, government National Insurance increases and rising staff costs. Solutions identified were also uniform across the sector: job cuts were supposed to be a means to address the fall in surpluses.

The University UK’s September 2024 report, Opportunity, Growth and Partnership: A Blueprint for Change from the UK’s Universities is their response to the crisis of HE funding and the return of a Labour government. UUK is advocating shared services, outsourcing and joint ventures as a means to ‘reform’ HE. The authors are a who’s-who of the architects of the crisis! David Willetts, villain of the 2011 hike in tuition fees, is a contributor who opines about ‘global reach, reputation and impact.’ Another author, Peter Mandelson, who has been active in the press on this matter, uses the analogy of the academy chain in the school system as a model for shared services.

UUK has followed up on their Blueprint with the establishment of a ‘Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce’ in January 2025, with restructuring of professional services at the heart of its remit. The head of this Taskforce is a merger-and-acquisitions lawyer and VC of the University of the Arts London, Sir Nigel Carrington, producing a report on 2 June, Towards a New Era of Collaboration.

While a general crisis of profitability in the sector erupted in 2024, not all institutions felt the crisis in the same form. Many of those most successful in expanding student numbers saw a fall in their surpluses, while a smaller number that had been less successful in sustaining their expansion were unable to maintain sufficient surpluses to remain solvent. In these cases, real deficits are appearing which have the potential to force institutions into insolvency.

Class and Conflict in the Crisis

Newcastle and Dundee Universities are examples of these two types of institutions. Newcastle University, a university that reported a £190m cash surplus for the financial year 2023-24, declared a £35m budget shortfall (i.e. a surplus below its budget target) in October 2024, and demanded 300 job cuts. The University of Dundee, which failed to publish its Financial Statement for 2023-24 due to its cashflow crisis and impending insolvency, declared a £35m deficit in November 2024 and demanded 632.4 full time equivalent job losses.^[iv]

The two universities also shared similarities, which are the focus of the remaining sections of this piece, namely the response of the UCU branches and their members in building campaigns against the job cuts which proved successful in defeating their employers.

We offer our summaries of what happened to encourage colleagues across the union to discuss them and consider what they can apply to their own situations. We will have to learn from these important examples in the coming months. Hopefully this will be in the context of UK-wide industrial action, so branches won’t always be striking alone as we found ourselves.

The membership of our union branches rejected the managed decline of the sector promoted by employers, policy analysts and even some within its own union leadership. The branches launched immediate mass mobilisations of members, moving speedily to industrial action, leading to sustained strike action. This was combined with broad mass political campaigns to win hearts and minds in the wider population. These highlighted the governance crisis at the heart of the sector, identified sector-wide political solutions required to prevent collapse, and built broad-based solidarity campaigns involving students, communities, political parties, national demonstrations and lobbies.

The two campaigns were not identical, but both identified key areas of weakness in their employer’s approach and responded to the specific timescales of the redundancies being imposed on staff. Newcastle UCU successfully mobilised mass picketing, taking strike days during marking season, and exploited the pressure a national demonstration could bring to bear on their employer. Dundee UCU managed to mobilise political pressure on the devolved Scottish Government, as its university management collapsed in disarray, as a focus for campaigning. Most importantly, however, despite these differences, both were underpinned by recognising the need for extensive strike action from the start, mass mobilisation of the union membership which built the union, and a general militancy in approach.

How to Win

Both branches sought to maximize industrial leverage on the employer by getting ahead of timelines of balloting and redundancy consultation through declaring a dispute at an early stage. They rejected the traditional UCU ‘long haul’ approach of small-scale strike action and waiting for a management response. They recognised that this simply did not measure up to the scale of the crisis, and that without a clear lead, staff would be demoralised and leave.

Hard-hitting industrial action created the capacity within the branches for — and amplified — a wide repertoire of campaigning in the political lobbying sphere, within the academic and governance spheres, and in the press. In Newcastle’s case, four weeks of action were initially notified, while Dundee’s three weeks took them to the end of the semester (Scottish Universities timetables are significantly earlier than most English universities). These were not the end, but were followed by further periods of strikes to increase pressure on employers.

Crucial to taking militant industrial action was the involvement of the membership at every step of the way. Dundee initiated a series of ‘Townhall’ meetings open to all staff, not just those of UCU or UNITE and UNISON. These typically involved over 1,000 staff, the largest meetings ever held at the University. Weekly branch meetings and member involvement meant that decisions were not the prerogative of the branch leadership but were in the hands of members, who regularly opted for a stronger response to the employers.

Rejection of redundancies also required an intellectual argument. In both universities, UCU members voted to reject all redundancies and not limit themselves to compulsory redundancies. Members drafted reports highlighting the expansion of capital expenditure and increases in other operating costs rather than staff costs, that were at the core of the university’s failed strategies.

Two further important initiatives were developed in the branches which acted to expand recognition of the disputes beyond their local branches and raise solidarity. In the case of Newcastle, the branch coined the phrase ‘Spreading the Resistance’. It was clear that what was occurring in Newcastle would spread across the sector, so encouraging other branches to adopt a similar militant approach, combined with raising financial support for the strikes, had the potential to spread the local campaign into a sector-wide campaign. This was not purely altruistic: it increased pressure on the Newcastle VC to concede.

In Dundee’s case, the financial crisis was deepened by the collapse of the University Executive Group. Of the eight senior managers in post at the beginning of the year, all bar two resigned over the following weeks and months. Initiated by the Finance Director’s early departure, the Principal, Vice Principals and University Secretary all left in rapid succession. The resignations spread beyond the UEG into the Court governing body. Currently, Dundee University remains a university without a functioning UEG and Court.

The UCU’s campaign, led by Dundee UCU and backed by UCU Scotland, forced the Scottish Government into a very public commitment to financially underpin the University. To-date, £22m has been awarded to stabilise the university’s liquidity crisis, and two further years of funding, estimated at around £20m per annum, has been identified.

This approach also ensured that the dispute could go beyond that of the original declared trade dispute. Other staff at risk of redundancy, not the focus of the original 632.4FTE staff cuts, including casual staff on zero-hour contracts in the Medical School, research funded staff and those running online modules in the School of Engineering all saw their jobs saved as the branch linked their job cuts to a wider demand of no redundancies.

The approach taken provides a blueprint of how to halt the employers’ offensive in institutions in very different circumstances. This approach is forcing Higher Education onto the political agenda, so that governments are forced to intervene and the HE funding model itself is put up for public debate. Crucially it also means that the voices of university staff and not just the employers are heard.

Organising to Win

The role of activists in both branches and branch leaderships proved crucial to the successful development of the two strikes. Mass meetings and weekly branch meetings encouraged the existing branch leaderships to broaden the base and leaderships of the strikes. Initiatives came from new and older reps.

We will give three important examples to illustrate this point.

First a positive example: the push to move to early balloting. Within UCU there is a general conservativism which has a tendency to delay balloting, often imposing extensive informal ‘further consultation’ and extended ballot timetables. But all of these restrict the window for strike action during the teaching period. UCU’s current ‘Building to Win’ strategy document, written by paid officials, does not even include industrial action in its approach, and centres negotiation, within a ‘credible prospect of a positive outcome’ (sic), as the most desirable outcome.^[v]

The confidence of members would be completely undermined had the local branches not fought for a much more urgent campaign and ballot timetable. Wider networks of reps and activists, including in the UCU Solidarity Movement, also proved crucial in listening to, and offering advice, in this process. In both cases, branches succeeded in dramatically reducing proposed timescales from declaring disputes to their first day of strike action, putting the branches in a much stronger position.

But not all examples are positive. The second example was negative: the overturning of branch decisions to campaign against all redundancies. UCU only balloted against compulsory redundancies, against the express desire of repeated branch meetings. This is a mistake that weakened branch campaigning, not least for the simple reason that everyone understands that accepting voluntary redundancy leaves those remaining with unmanageable workloads.

The final example, a failure to include an explicit reference to a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) in the Newcastle ballot, further restricted the extent to which branches could initiate action after the teaching semesters had finished. Newcastle UCU’s initiative of ‘MAB strike days’ was explicitly designed to overcome this limitation.

Activists, new and old, had to learn quickly that not only were they fighting their employer, but overcoming inertia within UCU itself was necessary to maximise our leverage.

National Demo in Newcastle - rally by the Monument — National Demo in Newcastle – rally by the Monument, Wed June 11 2025.

Lessons Learned: Power Lies in the Rank and File

The experiences of Newcastle and Dundee UCU branches, rooted in divergent experiences of the crisis in Higher Education, show that UCU does not simply have to accept the management of decline in the sector or limit itself to so-called ‘credible’ demands. Job cuts can be stopped, management can be challenged, and new funding can be won for the sector. Confidence in our strength provides the opportunity to move beyond the limits of a trade dispute and develop new forms of industrial action or expand our demands to cover other vulnerable staff groups, such as grant-funded researchers.

The ability to do so comes from the militancy of members and branches leading a broad fight, underpinned by extensive strike action. Balloting promptly, mobilising the membership quickly and promoting their decision-making through branch meetings, taking bold action and building a wider campaign of solidarity all increase the likelihood of victory against employer attacks.

We would encourage all UCU activists and branches facing redundancy to look closely at the methods adopted by Newcastle and Dundee UCU. These provide just two examples of success branches can learn from. We would encourage you to invite speakers from these branches to your branch meetings.

— Carlo Morelli (Dundee) and Matt Perry (Newcastle)

Notes

[i] Financial Times, (2023), The looming financial crisis at UK universities, 18^th July 2023. Available at The looming financial crisis at UK universities. London Economics, (2024), Examination of higher education fees and funding in England Policy note, February 2024. Available at PowerPoint Presentation, accessed 19^th July 2025.

[ii] Queen Mary University UCU (2025), UK HE Shrinking, Available at UK HE shrinking, Accessed 19^th July 2025.

Times Higher Education (2024), UK University funding ‘at a crossroads’ ahead of general election, 6^th February 2024. Available at UK university funding ‘at a crossroads’ | Times Higher Education (THE), accessed 19^th July 2025.

[iii] For a history of the introduction of the market to higher education see A. McGettigan, (2013), The Great University Gamble: Money, markets and the future of Higher Education, Pluto Press: London.

[iv] University of Newcastle (2024), Integrated Annual Report 2023-24, p.65. Available at IAR-23-24-compressed.pdf, accessed 20^th July 2025. The Courier (2025), Newcastle University responds to job losses and the UCU’s strike action. Available at Newcastle University responds to job losses and the UCU’s strike action – The Courier Online accessed 20^th July 2025. Financial Times, (2025), How a cash crisis pushed Dundee university to brink of collapse. Available at How a cash crisis pushed Dundee university to brink of collapse accessed 20^th July 2025.

[v] UCU, Building local bargaining project paper: BUILDING TO WIN: available at 20240930_Building_to_Win_Local_bargaining_project.pdf, accessed 23^rd July 2025.

4 October 202410 October 2024

Building a national UCU HE campaign in 2024

The UCU’s Higher Education Committee met on Friday 27 September to decide on next steps in the 2024 national pay and related claim.

We have reached the end of a series of formal negotiations over pay and pay-related elements. Most employers are already moving to impose the offer on pay in members’ pay, but some — perhaps as many as 20 — have told union branches they intend to ‘defer’ for 11 months.

In the immediate term, HEC voted overwhelmingly to keep the dispute over pay alive. There was a recognition that we have both a major opportunity — to put pressure on the new Labour Government — and a major threat — a spiral of sectoral decline — to address.

As we set out below, the best way to develop a campaign to defend our sector includes an industrial campaign over pay. A UK-wide pay campaign can mobilise our members against the ongoing Cost of Living crisis and demand UK-wide solutions that Higher Education urgently needs.

At the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) before the HEC, no delegate spoke in favour of the pay offer. Everyone knows that it is a pay cut, on top of the 11% cut in pay members suffered in two years previously. Staging the payment adds insult to injury. But there was doubt expressed by a number of delegates as to whether we could win more. All members, delegates and branches need a strategy to turn the situation around.

HEC voted to reject the pay offer and accept the pay-related elements of the offer. Some branches at the BDM reported that their members voted to reject the pay-related elements (terms of reference for negotiation over the other Three Fights) because the offer was too vague. But ‘acceptance’ simply means UCU agrees to go into negotiations in JNCHES over national policy recommendations. And it would mean that any industrial action and ballot would be specified in relation to the pay claim.

Such an ‘acceptance’ does not prevent branches fighting for best practice at a local level with specific local claims to employers. Nor would it stop the union campaigning publicly over casualisation abuses, chronic workload or discriminatory pay gaps.

Indeed, the strategy we attempt to set out below could provide a good platform to expose the current poor state of UK Higher Education working conditions.

The employers’ offensive

Over the last year, as many as a third of Vice Chancellors have asserted the need for cuts in jobs. We have seen a wave of major redundancy programmes across the sector. As well as creating suffering among our members in branches, the VC’s mantra of ‘affordability’ has cast a long shadow over negotiations at the top table.

Redundancy programmes and course closures are not new — ever since London Met’s infamous shrinking by two-thirds, numerous universities, including recently Roehampton, Wolverhampton and Goldsmiths have borne the brunt of horrific purges. But in previous years, major redundancy programmes were exceptional. Employers knew they risked undermining student recruitment in a ‘competitive marketplace’. Instead they mostly managed workforce numbers over time via means that avoided a public crisis, such as retirement, recruitment freezes and voluntary schemes.

Unfortunately in the face of this wave of redundancies, UCU’s approach has been to keep the fight local. Branches have been supported by the central union, but apart from independent rank-and-file initiatives there has been no attempt to bring the whole union together to fight them. Many members hear about redundancies, but in a piecemeal way. Their union is not mobilising them to offer solidarity. Even the Higher Education Committee has not been permitted to see a breakdown of redundancies branch-by-branch, despite HEC members asking for this information repeatedly.

There are two overarching factors as to why the last year has been marked by a redundancy wave. The first is the cumulative division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in market competition for students, worsening ever since 2010. Sooner or later the dam would break.

The second is the way our own union has reacted to the failure to meet the ballot threshold in Autumn 2023. Having botched the MAB by refusing to implement a summer reballot, and refusing to set up Conference-mandated strike committees to allow branches continuous reporting and control over the dispute, our union leadership effectively signaled defeat to the employers. Seeing their chance, Vice Chancellors rolled out their revenge across the country. The sector was now ‘in crisis’ despite universities sitting on billions in reserves.

We cannot continue like this. We have to say ‘enough’.

We need to discuss a serious strategy that can put meaningful pressure both on employers and the new Labour Government to change course.

We need to borrow from the successful NEU schoolteachers’ campaign for a ‘Fully Funded Pay Rise’, linking the fight over pay to the fight to defend the sector.

So how can we do that?

Building a new kind of dispute

We think UCU needs a joined up campaign, consisting of two elements: political campaign for a Fully-Funded Sector and an industrial campaign for a Fully-Funded Pay Rise. Many of the elements of this campaign are already policy, having been voted for by our Special Sector Conference in April.

This has to be a campaign that puts branches facing redundancies right at the centre. No branch and no members should be left behind.

Our inspiration should be the pay campaign run by the National Education Union (NEU). From the outset of their dispute, the NEU knew that schools in England and Wales would not be able to meet their pay demands. So they made that message part of their campaign.

They did not limit their demands to what the employers could afford. After all, a school with unbudgeted RAAC that turned the lights off after kids went home would not suddenly find cash for pay rises stashed away in a cupboard!

We need to take a leaf out of their book.

The public political campaign, which we suggest we could call For A Fully-Funded Sector, needs to be discussed and refined at branch, region and nation level, with initiatives taken up by all union bodies that can articulate both immediate and near-term demands to the new Labour Government. This would then be the backdrop for a ballot members over the national JNCHES claim (RPI+2% over pay).

HEC agreed to launch a consultative ballot as part of this campaign.

We need to urgently elaborate a strategy that all of our HE branches can get behind.

For a Fully-Funded Sector

The current home undergraduate tuition fee and loan system in England is unjust and unsustainable. Scottish universities have never had these high fees, and Northern Ireland and Wales had reduced fees. The falling real values of tuition fees, plus the competition for students built into the system, have cumulatively created the current crisis in the sector. Raising fees to £12,000+ a year, as Universities UK (UUK) wants, is socially regressive, unjust and politically divisive, will not address the ‘winners and losers’ problem, and could cause student enrolments to fall.

Recent reports that Bridget Phillipson is contemplating raising tuition fees to £10,500 a year shows that Labour is under pressure to do something. But it also shows that UUK are more influential than UCU right now.

In fact in the short term — without touching student fee levels — Labour can be called on to take three steps which together would begin to level the playing field in the sector. These were agreed by the Special HE Sector Conference earlier this year.

Cancel (or agree to pay) the TPS surcharge. These are extra costs the Treasury has imposed on TPS employers as a result of the most recent pension valuation. Schools and FE colleges are not required to pay this cost for at least a year. But Post-92 universities are shouldering an additional cost of between 3 and 5% of total salary. This partially explains why so many Post-92s have triggered redundancy programmes.
End the Hostile Environment, and ensure student visa routes are humane, affordable and rational. This means resurrecting post-study visas and visas for dependents. Labour should also abolish the migrant salary threshold for all. Right now universities outside of London cannot even internationally recruit postgraduate research assistants. Universities employ very large numbers of part-time teaching staff — none can be recruited internationally.
Bring back the ‘block grant’. This is a teaching grant to departments that was abolished for many disciplines (including all of Arts and Humanities) in 2010, and reduced heavily in others. We need to resurrect support for courses that have been denied historic levels of funding for years. This could be fixed at a student number cap, allowing the government to bring back caps on regulated student recruitment in stages.

These are all short-term demands. But none of them require tuition fees to rise.

Having cheer-led for £9k fees, the Vice Chancellors in Universities UK are now campaigning to raise even higher fees — to over £12k. But the demand to increase tuition fees is obviously unfair, and would be politically difficult for the Government. It is by no means clear that Labour will increase fees, but if they do, it won’t be enough for the VCs.

Although UUK envisage the tuition fee rise would be covered by the student loan, that would just mean that the student debt mountain would grow even faster than its current £20bn/year growth rate.

Student loans in England are large by international standards. — Student loans reached £236bn in March 2024. (Source: House of Commons Library.)

Paying universities directly via resurrecting block grants is simpler, focused and cheaper. It could also create some structural stability by financially underpinning departments previously reliant wholly on student recruitment.

The market system got us to the current crisis. The solution is not more of the same.

Winners, losers, and building unity

Raising home undergraduate tuition fees by £1,000 per student/year or so can ease finances slightly.

But it will escalate, rather than moderate, the market war-of-all-against-all that the sector was plunged into in 2014 when the Government allowed universities to make unlimited numbers of offers to home students (with the exception of Medicine). It will increase income to the universities with the most home students. And it will add to the loan every student will borrow and be expected to ultimately pay back — which may mean a further disincentive to working class undergraduates.

Winners and losers - 2019 (Source: UCEA) — ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ – 2018-19 (Source: UCEA)

In recent years, this scenario of ‘winners and losers’ has been used by the employers to undermine national pay negotiations.

The employers’ approach is to set the national pay rate at a level the poorest university in the sector can afford. Then some universities may choose to make better offers to (some) staff. This process may be via permitted local negotiated arrangements (e.g. London Weighting or adjusted grade boundaries), one-off payments such as ‘Covid enhancements’, or, more individually, by promotion programmes and market supplements. Exceptionally it may be through universities exiting national negotiations.

The result is that what started as a ‘rate for the job’ national negotiation starts to become one of below-inflation offers followed by limited and selective local and personal negotiation. Collective bargaining, sector cohesion and principles of solidarity and equity between staff and union branches are undermined.

This process is working for the employers. Universities are spending ever-smaller proportions of their budgets on staff. In the 1970s, some research-based universities spent as much as two-thirds of their budgets on staff costs. 50 years later, and that figure has fallen to nearly half.

In their last-published release, the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that UK-wide staff costs had fallen to a record low of 50.8% of expenditure in 2022/23. The proportion is lowest in England (averaged across many universities) and greatest in Northern Ireland. Recent fluctuations aside (Covid and USS being likely factors), the tendency remains downward. The last sharp downturn between the 2021 to 2022-23 financial years coincides with the sharp rise in inflation (raising capital and operating costs) and below-inflation pay rises.

Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure (HESA) 2014-23 — Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure 2014-23. Source: HESA.

Paradoxically, as universities have become more and more focused on mass teaching, and more and more labour intensive, they have tended to spend a smaller proportion of their budgets on staff.

UCU, and its forerunners Natfhe and AUT, has always argued that pay levels should be based on inflation and the cost of living, not on what individual universities claim is ‘affordable’. Indeed, once we concede that argument, we know we become the prisoners of Vice Chancellors’ financial gambles. Employers show us empty balance sheets: redundancies become inevitable, and colleagues are put in a zero-sum game over jobs and pay. That is why a local bargaining strategy like the General Secretary’s latest misnamed ‘Building to Win’ strategy is guaranteed to spiral to defeat.

We need to reset our campaign, and fight over pay in a different way, one that does not let the Government off the hook for the Higher Education crisis.

It’s why we need an combined industrial and political campaign that calls for a Fully-Funded Sector and a Fully-Funded Pay Rise.

Redundancies and the Other Three Fights

A campaign of the type described here can create the kind of broad-based public political platform would also allow the union to highlight the worst managerial behaviour we see in Higher Education.

We all know that market volatility drives employment volatility. Fighting for secure funding is crucial to take on the public argument about job insecurity and redundancies. So when we say we want a Fully-Funded Sector we can also say we want Secure Jobs and No Redundancies within it.

The same approach applies to Workloads and Pay Gaps. We can put our members at the forefront of this campaign. Our colleagues are by far the best spokespeople. They can say that they must have Time to Think! Or they can expose the reality for women, Black members, Disabled members and others who find themselves held back by structural barriers to progression.

This should be an opportunity to enable our members to lobby MPs and others, to give members a platform to speak up about the real conditions in our sector.

This approach also gives our members a platform over Pay. We can show that we are both committed to fighting low pay in the here and now, and to viable employment for the next generation of researchers, lecturers, and academic-related staff.

Industrial action for Fully-Funded Pay

But we can and must go one step further — we will need to take industrial action to highlight how far our pay has fallen. Mobilising the union onto the picket lines and streets is crucial to show the public and MPs that we are serious. Without that step, we risk being written off as just another lobby.

The action that we took in 2022-23 was extremely hard-hitting. But it was focused specifically on employers. That meant long periods of industrial action. A campaign that is focused both on the employers and government could look different. What it looks like is something we need to discuss as a union.

Most obviously, we could start with specific days which have an impact in Westminster or other national parliaments.

But the first key focus for activists is to put UCU in a position to signal to the Labour Government that UCU members are prepared to return to picket lines. In order to do that we need to win an industrial action ballot.

Right now, to implement this plan we will need to take some practical steps. Rushing straight out to an Industrial Action ballot without explaining the strategy in branches would be likely to fail to mobilise the 50% of membership required to win a ballot. Indeed, it would also be a huge missed opportunity. We have vast knowledge and expertise among our members. We should develop the plan in conjunction with branch officers and reps.

A consultative ballot is coming our way.

We should not roll out a consultative ballot alone. The ballot should be part of an urgent serious structured discussion in our union about how we can put across our union’s arguments and mobilise our members in speaking up for our sector.

There will likely be more Q&As organised centrally. Branches can invite HEC members and national negotiators to speak at branch meetings.

This is a chance for all members to discuss how we can build a proper grass-roots membership-driven campaign to defend our sector, our colleagues and our pay.

Our sector is at an historic juncture.

The market system is publicly failing. We must make sure neither staff nor students pay the price.