We met on 17 October with the University senior management, led by Provost Stephen Jarvis. Please see below our update on those talks. There is some good, some bad, and some areas where consultation of members is needed.

The Good

Nursery fees 10% salary sacrifice to be scrapped. Having brought attention to the fact that staff have been subjected to a dubious 10% supplement on nursery fees if they opt into the nursery salary sacrifice scheme, and having made this one of our key local negotiation items in recent weeks, we are pleased to confirm that the University have now agreed to scrap this 10% supplement. This is a big improvement for our members using the nursery!

Bridge funding. The University management have now confirmed that they will provide 3 months of “bridge funding” for all academic research staff whose work is externally funded using research grants. This will create a much-needed “buffer” so that staff who face redundancy due to the expiry of research grants will have an additional 3 months’ employment, funded by the University, to avoid redundancy whilst further external funding is sought. Again, this is a very good development and a significant achievement for our anti-casualisation campaign.

The Bad

Workload. Provost Stephen Jarvis has now told us that he absolutely refuses to consider negotiation or consultation over existing University workload models (WAM). This is a major setback and amounts to a further deterioration of our working conditions. This is in a context where the most recent UoB staff survey found 59% of staff did not agree that they had sufficient time to achieve all work expected of them, and 50% did not agree their workload was reasonable (both of these scores are considerably worse than the Russel Group average). Up until now, we have successfully entered negotiations over the WAM in both the College of Social Sciences and the College of Arts. This negotiation has allowed us to make important changes to workload calculations in those Colleges. We have been seeking an extension of that  principle to negotiate to all Colleges across the University. Instead, we are now told that there will be no consultation or negotiation whatsoever across the University. This is deeply disappointing and we will need to consider our next steps on this issue.

Members’ input needed

Disabled Employees Advisor. The University’s Disabled Employees Advisor position was scrapped during the pandemic, and the University management have consistently refused to replace this role, meaning there is no longer any Disabled Employees Advisor at UoB. This was an important post and the Advisor provided advice to disabled staff around issues such as reasonable adjustments, employment rights, and help for disabled staff to navigate the University system and their line managers. It is a sorely missed role and we have been consistently arguing for a replacement to be put in post. Unfortunately the University managers have so far refused. We have now been told that the information that the Disabled Employees Advisor used to provide will now be provided by a special web portal on the University intranet. We are seeking member input to ascertain whether our UCU members agree with the University managers that a web portal is a sufficient replacement for the role of Disabled Employees Advisor.

23 October 2023