The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has now informed us that they are to launch an official inspection into the management of stress at the University of Birmingham.

This follows a UCU complaint we submitted to the HSE in the summer. Taking the period from 2020 as a whole, stress has been the single largest cause of illness-related absence at the University (17,525 days stress-related absence). Yet amazingly the University management have not produced a single workplace stress risk assessment across the entire university for the past three years. Its own policy makes each Head of College directly responsible for producing these stress risk assessments, yet when we wrote to each one in February 2024 not a single one could reply with any evidence of a stress risk assessment.

Instead the University management have repeatedly claimed that the staff survey is sufficient as a replacement for a stress risk assessment.

The HSE, in its reply to the University’s response to our complaint, received Friday 12th December, notes “I do not consider that your reply provides sufficient assurance that work-related stress is being suitably managed by the University. This is because almost all your stated control measures are tertiary, or lagging measures, that deal with stress once it has become a problem. For instance, tracking the reasons why your employees access the employee assist programme, and your staff survey being a lagging measure of the University’s performance.”

The HSE inspector goes on: “I have considered your offer to get in touch if I have further queries, but I do not think further correspondence will be sufficient and as a result we will be inspecting the University’s management of work-related stress in the new year.”

The full letter can be viewed here.

We are of course pleased that the HSE has finally recognised the woeful lack of attention to our work-related stress. We will now be engaging with the University and the HSE in an attempt to negotiate a proper approach to stress.

Workload—and the ongoing refusal to negotiate workload recognition across the University—is our number one priority to reduce work-related stress.

The inspection provides us with an opportunity to bring about real changes for the benefit of all staff, at all levels, and BUCU will be gathering evidence to pass on to the inspectors when they arrive.

We will be in touch with members (and particularly with Departmental Reps) early in the New Year to share more about BUCU’s plans to leverage the momentum of the HSE referral and build a campaign about workload, work-related stress, and staff wellbeing—and there will be an opportunity for all staff to feed into the evidence-gathering process in due course.

However, if you currently work in an area where excessive workload and stress exists, and you feel you need to share individual concerns at this time, then please contact us at casework@birminghamucu.org. To help us manage these queries, please give your email the subject header of ‘HSE’, and let us know whether you are sharing in order to access casework support, or to provide evidence for the HSE inspection.