29 June 2026

Your union has been involved in three separate redundancy consultations at the University this calendar year. We raised serious concerns with the University and, in the absence of a satisfactory response, have since written to the University Council and to our local MP.

We are not convinced by the business cases. Redundancy ends careers and removes capacity the University often struggles to rebuild, so the case for it should be robust, transparent, and able to withstand scrutiny. In all three, we are not persuaded that compulsory redundancies are genuinely necessary, that the savings are real and proportionate, or that the alternatives have been properly explored first. A weak business case is not a technicality; it is the foundation on which every later decision rests, including who is placed at risk.

It is on that foundation that our gravest concern sits. Across all three consultations, the staff losing their posts are, without exception, from ethnic minority backgrounds. In two of the three, everyone selected for redundancy is from an ethnic minority background; in the third, everyone who has left — whether through compulsory redundancy or voluntary severance — is from an ethnic minority background.

This is not who we are as a community. A commitment to anti-racism, and to the fair and equal treatment of colleagues regardless of ethnicity, is not the preserve of a few. It is a principle our members hold, that the wider body of University staff hold, and that the University itself claims as one of its own values. An outcome in which the entire burden of every redundancy process falls on ethnic minority colleagues cannot be reconciled with those shared principles — and we believe staff across this institution, whatever their role and wherever they sit, would recognise it as such.

A staffing decision does not have to be intended as discriminatory to produce a discriminatory outcome, and the Equality Act 2010 places clear duties on employers to anticipate and address the disproportionate impact of their decisions on protected groups. When the same outcome recurs across three separate processes, it can no longer be set aside as coincidence. A leadership team that allows such a pattern to stand without examination cannot, in good conscience, claim to be upholding the anti-racist commitments it asks the rest of us to live by.

There is a clear and immediate remedy: dissolve these redundancy pools. By choosing instead to keep them open — to press ahead with processes whose entire burden falls on ethnic minority colleagues — University management sets itself at odds with every member of this University, whose shared commitment to fairness and to anti-racism these decisions disregard.

We would also press the University to account for the impact on those who remain. A process that removes posts without removing the work does not deliver the savings claimed; it transfers them, as additional workload and stress, onto the colleagues who stay. Given the University’s existing obligations under the HSE Management Standards, and its own recent history on work-related stress, the foreseeable effect on the health, workload and capacity of remaining staff is a material gap in each of these cases, not a secondary one.

The University has declined to share the Equality Impact Assessment. We asked to see it, or equivalent evidence showing how the equality implications were assessed and mitigated. That request was refused. An Equality Impact Assessment is how an employer demonstrates that it has met its legal duties; declining to share it leaves a serious question hanging.

This is why we have written to Council and to our MP. We do not escalate lightly, and we would always prefer dialogue. But where we are not convinced by the business cases, where we have observed a pattern that cuts against the anti-racist values this whole community shares, and where the evidence we have asked for has been withheld, we have a responsibility to put these concerns on the record and to have them properly scrutinised.