Author: UCU Nottingham

Email sent to members on Monday 20th April 2026.

As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails, authored by different UCU members, examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we look at the implications of missing Equality Impact Assessments for staff. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

When Equality Becomes an Afterthought: EIA Failures and What They Mean for Us All

Across the sector, we are seeing rapid institutional change: course closures, workload intensification, restructuring, and cuts to resources. At the University of Nottingham, Future Nottingham is steamrolling a number of cuts and proposed cuts: 48 courses; high staff student ratios; the Hopper Bus service; journal access; office cleaning, to name just a few.  But alongside the pace and scale of change, something critical is being quietly sidelined: equality.

Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) are not optional extras. They are a legal requirement under the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), designed to ensure that institutions actively consider how decisions affect people with protected characteristics. In theory, EIAs should be a safeguard against discrimination. In practice, they are increasingly absent, incomplete, or superficial.

Our local tracking of EIA compliance reveals a deeply concerning pattern:

• Major structural changes – including increases in student-staff ratios, reductions in research time, and cuts to services – are being presented in the Business Case to Council on 6 May with no completed EIAs.
• Where EIAs do exist (for example, course suspensions – the only one UCU has seen to date), they are partial and limited, focusing narrowly on students while ignoring impacts on staff.
• In some cases, decisions (journal access; office cleaning) have already been made and implemented months before any EIA is completed, raising serious questions about whether equality considerations are being meaningfully applied at all.

This is not a technical oversight. It is a systemic failure.

Why EIAs Matter

EIAs are meant to ensure that institutions have ‘due regard’ to three core aims:

1. Eliminating discrimination
2. Advancing equality of opportunity
3. Fostering good relations

When EIAs are missing or inadequate, these duties are not being met. And the consequences are not abstract.

• Increasing student-staff ratios disproportionately affects staff with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and those already managing high workloads.
• Reductions in research time may deepen existing inequalities in promotion and progression, particularly for women and minoritised staff.
• Cuts to services (like libraries, transport, and cleaning) can have uneven impacts across different groups, including disabled staff and students.

Without proper EIAs, these impacts remain invisible – and therefore unchallenged.

The Problem of ‘Tick-Box’ Equality

Even where EIAs are produced, there is a growing concern that they function as a tick-box exercise rather than a meaningful process.

A basic or retrospective EIA – especially one that only considers a subset of those affected – does not meet the standard of ‘due regard.’ Equality must be considered before decisions are made, not after they are implemented.

What we are seeing instead is a hollowing out of equality processes:

• EIAs completed late (or not at all)
• Narrow framing of who counts (students but not staff)
• Lack of evidence or engagement with unions and affected groups

This undermines both the spirit and the letter of the law.

What Can Be Done?

There are several routes for challenging EIA failures:

1. Internal challenge

Members can:

• Request EIAs and supporting evidence
• Raise concerns through formal structures (e.g. committees, grievances)
• Push for transparency around decision-making (ask to see meeting notes, where the EIA was discussed)

2. External escalation

Where internal processes fail, issues can be escalated to bodies such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has powers to investigate and enforce compliance.

3. Legal routes

In some cases, decisions made without proper equality consideration can be challenged through judicial review. Importantly, such challenges must be made promptly.

A Collective Responsibility

EIA failures are not just procedural issues – they are about whose voices are heard, whose experiences are recognised, and whose wellbeing is prioritised.

For UCU members, this is a collective concern. Equality is not a separate agenda from workload, job security, or working conditions – it is embedded within them. When equality processes fail, it is often the most vulnerable colleagues who bear the brunt.

We need to:

• Keep documenting and evidencing these failures (contact us/your local rep and let us know)
• Continue raising them through union structures
• Build collective pressure for transparency and accountability

Because equality should not be an afterthought. It should be at the heart of every decision our institution make.

If you have concerns about EIAs in your area, please get in touch with your UCU rep. Together, we can ensure that equality is not sidelined through Future Nottingham.

                              On behalf of the UCU branch committe

Email sent to members on Wednesday 15th April 2026.

Dear all,

Your elected delegates for 2026 Congress and HE Sector Conference have started their preparations. Several key documents have been published that give us a sense of the issues to be debated and decided. We highlight below what we believe are the most impactful and/or contentious motions and rule change proposals. We also provide a guide on how you can approach your own appraisal of what is on the provisional agenda and let your elected delegates know your thoughts. Note that there is still the opportunity to nominate yourself as our fourth delegate. Should you wish to join our delegation, this will need to be voted on at our 21 April 2026 branch meeting. 

The following decisions are, in our view, bound to have a substantial impact on the union (membership) and/or contentious. Where the branch has taken a position on an issue, for example the situation in Palestine or the Unite UCU dispute which were the topic of motions passed in previous general meetings, those positions are taken to apply to any motions on those issues. 

Motion/rule change titles are shown in bold & accompanied by the unique code so you can easily search for them here. You can provide your input to the branch delegates, and views more generally on what is on the agenda at Congress and the HE Sector Conference, via this Google form. 

1. Several proposals relate to the way UCU should pursue industrial strategy. 

a.                  Noting that the 50% for threshold on turnout is due to be overturned (August 2026) by the Employment Rights Act 2025 , and that 50% participation in voting does not always equate to 50% of members taking action, HE1 could demand a lot in UCU resourcing (both locally and nationally) for a potential summer 2026 ballot. August is also due to see unions being able to move from the necessity of Civica for postal balloting.

b.                  UoNUCU supported last year’s motion HE14 Composite: Trade union dispute with Secretary of State for Education over funding,. HE2 seeks to move UCU from working behind the scenes on the practical implications of this to opening a live dispute.

c.                  HE6 looks to address pay disparity for the most senior HE staff, including expanding the published pay spines.

2. A series of Strategy and Finance Committee motions will be debated in private session (no non-member observers). SFC1-3 seek re-approval of auditors, the accounts and budget. SFC4 presents the union’s own preferred levels of subscriptions followed by SFC5-7 which look to change subscription bands and levels. Continuing previous motions, SFC8 looks to address the issues of access to UCU national Fighting Fund and rates members can claim. Member input from those with experience of interrogating accounts would be appreciated.

3. Unions have never been inward looking and international solidarity often intersects with issues around academic freedom. SFC27 Academic freedom and freedom of speech require industrial strength specifically identifies pressure from Zionists but not any other groups.

4. A proposal to apply similar freedom of information practices as public bodies to the union (R10 Rule Change: Transparency). As Gertjan Lucas noted last year when this was initially tabled, this proposal does not specify if the transparency duties to be applied to UCU are specific to information provision to members, nor whether they apply to national bodies, or all bodies of the union. The new duties this proposal creates may be resource intensive while also creating considerable discussion on the scope of any routine publication of information.

There are a couple of other motions we wish to highlight due to their importance and/or implications for the functioning of the union but would expect members to be supportive of.

1. There are several proposals around respect and representation of academic related and professional services (ARPS, which corresponds to University of Nottingham’s use of APM). These include updating model branch officer roles (R14), respect across sectors of ARPS members in UCU (SFC13), and the need for clear career progression (HE15).

2. EQ17 Reparative justice and the rise of anti-Black racism calls on UCU to be directly involved in campaigns for reparative justice and act against anti-black racism (note: UCU allows members to self-define for all equality groups).

Solidarity,