Email sent to members on Monday 19th June 2025
As part of our fight to protect jobs at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails outlining various aspects of our campaign. Today, we focus on current discussions between UCU and UoN management over Future Nottingham. Remember, further details about our campaign can be found on our webpages, via the redundancy campaign tab.
Chaos reigns supreme
Over recent weeks and months, members of the UCU committee have been in regular meetings with management over Future Nottingham cuts and restructuring including high-level general meetings as well as more focused meetings on different Chapters of current APM restructuring and redundancies.
Management argues that it is committed to sharing information, which in turn would allow UCU to work on alternative proposals. In practice, however, information is often incomplete, incorrect or simply not provided. This reflects the generally chaotic situation with redundancies at the moment. Numerous colleagues are being told that they are at risk of redundancy, then they are told that they are safe, before being put yet again into another redundancy pool.
Despite insufficient information, the committee is working hard on developing an alternative proposal to management’s Future Nottingham. We are clear, we will not accept compulsory redundancies.
Several developments have become clear in our meetings with management. First, despite the current chaos around redundancy pools, management pushes on regardless with restructuring. This also includes first discussions and a timeline about future redundancies of academics and technicians in the Autumn. As we have always maintained, nobody is safe!
Second, the big elephant in the room is management’s future savings target. Their objective is to generate a surplus of 5 per cent, i.e. £40m in 2025/2026. Historically, however, UoN surplus was somewhere in the area between 3 and 4 per cent in normal years. Increasing this to 5 per cent already puts undue pressure on finances in times of general uncertainty. Moreover, does this indicate that management simply continues with its faulty financial strategy? As we argued in our Alternative Financial Strategy 2.0, imposing cuts on essential activities to generate large surpluses for infrastructure investment has resulted in regular financial crises in the past. When is management going to learn the lessons from past mistakes?
To be clear, the UCU committee will continue to resist restructuring and job cuts in our meetings with management. What has become, however, abundantly clear is that words alone will not be enough to make management see sense. Only sustained and hard-hitting industrial action will ultimately ensure a better future for staff, students and UoN as a whole. Make sure that you vote in the current ballot!
