The Vice-Chancellor recently sent staff a message about how the University is governed. His message of 15 May tells us how our leadership understands the system it runs — and the picture it paints is, in important respects, the opposite of what the staff who work under that system actually experience.

This post sets the two side by side: the official account of scrutiny and shared endeavour, and the lived experience of the two bodies that the law recognises as the collective voice of staff — UCU and UNISON — when we sit down to negotiate.

The official account

The message offers a confident and, in places, attractive picture. Decisions, the Vice-Chancellor writes, are best taken “at the lowest possible level” — he reaches for the language of *subsidiarity*, by way of John Major and European theology, to describe a University in which almost everyone has the agency to decide how to do their job. Above that sit the weekly meetings of the University Executive Board and the wider University Leadership Group, which he describes as a forum where members “are not shy if they think that something is going wrong.” And above *that* sits Council, the governing body, which he tells us holds him and UEB to account and scrutinises their decisions “to an extent that isn’t always comfortable.”

Two things in the message deserve to be held onto.

First, an admission. For all the talk of devolved decision-making and checks and balances, the Vice-Chancellor concedes plainly that “UEB as a collective group, and me as Vice-Chancellor, both have considerable authority to make decisions that affect the future of our university.” That is offered as reassurance — the authority is real, but it is checked. The question this post asks is whether the checks are real too.

Second, a piece of distancing. The Global Top 50 ambition that now drives so much of the metric pressure across the institution was, he reminds us, “set by Council before I started as VC.” It is presented as inheritance rather than choice. But a strategy one inherits is still a strategy one chooses to execute — and to intensify. We will come back to it, because the pressure that strategy generates is the thread that runs through everything below.

The message, in effect, describes a hierarchy of checks: Council scrutinising the executive from above, an open culture of challenge in the middle, and trusted agency at the level of the individual desk below. It is worth testing each tier in turn.

At the top: what “independent” scrutiny is made of

The Vice-Chancellor describes Council’s lay majority as “entirely independent of the University” and “selected for their expertise and independence of mind.” He does not describe how they are selected. We have set this out in detail elsewhere, but the short version matters here: lay vacancies are considered by a Membership Committee drawn from sitting Council members, which recommends names to a Council that then votes on them. The body, in other words, replenishes itself. New lay members are nominated by the people already there.

Nor is the “expertise” as varied as the word implies. On the published record, the lay membership is drawn overwhelmingly from a single professional world: partner-level careers in the Big Four accountancy firms, corporate finance, management consultancy and investment banking. These are people who serve without payment and, in many cases, with real integrity and care. But it is a particular culture, with particular instincts about how to read a balance sheet, what makes a useful “metric”, and when consolidation counts as “efficiency”. And because the role is unpaid but substantial — several days of meetings and several hundred pages of board papers per cycle — it can in practice only be filled by those whose careers release them for unpaid senior work: serving partners, retired executives, portfolio non-executives. Working academics elsewhere, salaried mid-career professionals, trade union officers and people with caring responsibilities are structurally excluded.

The “four staff members drawn from our Senate” face a related constraint. They are elected — but from a Senate whose own composition is dominated by the executive and by people the executive appoints, with only a minority of seats returned by election from academic and research staff. An election can therefore follow the Statutes to the letter without ever placing on Council an academic whose presence the leadership has not, in effect, already approved.

This is the heart of the disagreement. The Vice-Chancellor experiences Council’s scrutiny as “not always comfortable”, and we do not doubt that he does. But discomfort *within* a shared worldview is not the same thing as independent challenge. A self-perpetuating board drawn from one professional culture, hearing strategic proposals from a similarly oriented executive, is not structurally well placed to act as a meaningful brake — however searching its questions feel in the room.

In the middle: the real test is what happens when staff negotiate

The message holds up the University Leadership Group as evidence of candour — a place where senior people “are not shy” about raising concerns. But it is an informal forum, populated by managers, meeting at the leadership’s invitation.

The message is not the only place the University points to as proof that it listens. On 29 April the University opened a “Future Organisational Shape of the University Survey” (closed on 22 May) and earlier this week the Provost announced the launch of the 2026 “Have Your Say” staff survey: a confidential, ten-minute questionnaire, run by an independent third party, whose results are “reviewed carefully”, “shared with leaders and teams” and used to decide where “action may be needed.” While we would not discourage anyone from completing it, it is worth being clear about what kind of mechanism it is. Because it is anonymous, no concern it surfaces can be taken up, escalated or resolved for the person who raised it; it is designed, analysed and actioned by management; and staff have no say over which of their answers become priorities and which are quietly filed. 

That distinction is not ours alone. On the one issue where an external regulator has examined whether the University’s listening is adequate — work-related stress — the Health and Safety Executive has made clear that an anonymous engagement survey of this kind is no substitute for what the law actually requires: proper risk assessment and genuine consultation with staff and their recognised safety representatives. The survey is offered as evidence that the University hears its staff. In the area that bears most directly on their health, the regulator has already found that hearing of this kind is not enough.

The *formal*, legally recognised mechanism for staff voice — collective bargaining and statutory consultation with the recognised unions — sits elsewhere, and it is precisely there that the genuine disagreement lives. There is a straightforward way to test whether this system genuinely consults: look at what happens when the bodies the law recognises as the collective voice of staff — UCU and UNISON — actually try to engage with it.

Our own experience this year has not matched the message. On the restructures running through the institution, the pattern has been depressingly consistent: consultation timetables set so tightly that requests for an extension are refused; information and post details disclosed late, after the point at which they could most usefully shape a response; and processes structured, school by school and tranche by tranche, in ways that appear designed to keep below the thresholds at which the fuller statutory collective-consultation obligations under the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act would bite.

UNISON, representing the professional services and support staff who keep the University running, reports the same dynamic from a different vantage point. Their members — the catering, cleaning, security and library staff, the lowest-paid of whom receive £13.45 an hour — took strike action last year over the University’s refusal to improve a similar offer to that applied to staff covered by national pay talks: a real-terms pay cut of 1.4%. In the same period, the Vice-Chancellor’s own total remuneration rose by nine per cent, to £453,000. UNISON is just as concerned as UCU about the restructure — in some ways more so, given both unions’ fear that the changes will be more drastic for professional services roles. The word both unions keep hearing is “functional coordination”, and so far it seems to be shorthand for underestimating workload pressures and forcing through changes to job descriptions with limited consultation.

So set the message against the record. The channels the Vice-Chancellor points to — an invited forum, an anonymous survey — are informal and managerial: voice on the employer’s terms. The channel the law recognises, collective bargaining with the staff it represents, is where positions do not move and information arrives too late to matter.

At the desk and in the school: subsidiarity for some

That leaves the foundation the whole message rests on: the agency of the individual member of staff. Here the gap is sharpest, because subsidiarity is tested in two places — at the individual desk, and at the level of the school — and it fails in both.

The Performance and Development Review is, on paper, subsidiarity made concrete: an annual, two-way conversation in which a member of staff and their reviewer agree development goals for the year ahead — the decision about how an individual does their job, taken at the level of that individual. In practice, our experience of negotiating the framework has been that “agreement” increasingly runs in one direction. The metrics that drive the Global Top 50 ambition and the surplus requirement reappear on individual review forms as objectives the member is now personally accountable for delivering. We have pressed, repeatedly, for safeguards: that objectives be genuinely negotiated rather than handed down; that the process remain developmental rather than become a route into performance management or capability; and that PDR records not be repurposed as evidence in restructure selection, promotion refusals or workload disputes.

The restructure shows the same logic one level up. It is the opposite of subsidiarity: the pressures are generated centrally, through a surplus target and through metrics that schools do not control and in some cases cannot reasonably meet, and severance windows are opened from above. This is where the inherited strategy comes home. The Global Top 50 ambition the Vice-Chancellor distances himself from is not an abstraction on a Council minute; it is the engine of the pressure that lands on individual objectives and on whole schools alike. 

Subsidiarity, it turns out, is for the decisions that do not threaten the strategy; the decisions that do are taken at the top.