Behind management’s latest moves: large scale compulsory redundancies coming soon
Welcome Week 2025 picket line at Kings Buildings
Peter Mathieson and the rest of the senior leadership team (SLT) are pushing ahead with plans to slash jobs. From the most recently available public figures, in the 2023-24 annual reports, the amount the University spent on staff was about £750m, and the SLT has announced the plan to cut this by £90m, more than 10%. This would mean about 1 in 8 members of staff losing their jobs. With hundreds of jobs already lost, a further 1,000+ jobs are on the line. In this post, we assess what management has done so far, and estimate the scale of cuts to come.
While many jobs have already been lost since budget cuts began at UoE in late summer 2024, the bulk of the cuts are still to come. In early 2025, the University ran a voluntary severance (VS) scheme, in which staff could volunteer to leave and receive a payout. This reduced the UoE salaries budget by about £18m and cut about 350 jobs. In his email of 25 June, Mathieson said the cancellation in the 2025-26 academic year of contribution rewards and academic promotions would save a further £6m.[1] It is estimated that millions more in staff costs have been cut through ‘hidden redundancies’ including the reduction of the available hours for those on guaranteed hours contracts and ending employment of staff on fixed-term contracts who might, in other circumstances, have expected their jobs to continue. In addition, an effective hiring freeze means a reduction in staff over time, as positions have remained unfilled when staff have left.
Management is seeking to cut down the salaries budget further with two measures currently underway. Until October 31, the University is running a voluntary redundancy (VR) scheme for those on grades 9 and 10 and offering a retirement offer. As a very crude estimate of what these are expected to achieve, one can posit that the average staff cost (including salary, employer taxes, employer pension contribution and so forth) for a staff member on grade 9 or 10 would not exceed £100,000/year and that the number of people taking the VR scheme is not likely to be more than 100, given the uptake for the VS scheme that offered more generous terms for leaving UoE employment, so the total saving would be less than £10m.
Totalling up the above efforts to reach the budgetary target—the £18m from the voluntary severance scheme, £6m from canceling promotion and contribution rewards, several millions from reducing the amount of guaranteed-hours and fixed-term work, and perhaps £10m from the current voluntary redundancy scheme, one gets a total less than £45m, that is less than half the total amount that the SLT has said they want to cut from the salaries budget. In short, unless management significantly alters its targets, there will have to be large-scale compulsory redundancies beyond the cuts that are already happening.
As previous blog posts have pointed out, the total number of jobs to be cut is difficult to predict precisely, but corresponds to a total between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs. From the University's Annual Report for 2023-24, there were 18,924 staff at the university corresponding to an equivalent of 13,102 full-time jobs, because of the large number of people with part-time work.
Estimating staff cuts on the horizon
There are several ways to estimate the possible scale of the job cuts that management has consistently refused to put a figure on. One method is that the planned cut of £90m from the £750m of staff spending corresponds to a 12% cut, and a 12% in the total number of jobs would mean cutting over 2,000 jobs or more than in 1,500 full-time equivalent. A second approach is to consider that the 350 jobs cut in the spring's VS scheme saved £18m; multiplying this by five, one can estimate that cutting £90m would mean cutting a total of 1,750 jobs, so a further 1,400 jobs beyond those already lost due to VS. As a third means of estimating job cuts, one can take the median pay of just under £42,000/year for UoE staff from the 2023-24 annual report, add 30% to account for employer national insurance contribution and for pension contributions, to approximate the total annual cost per full-time equivalent job as a little under £55,000 and divide the £90m in total staff costs by the cost per job, to estimate the number of jobs to be lost as slightly under 1,700 jobs.
Whichever estimate is used, these numbers are alarming and huge damage has already been done to the lives, livelihood and well-being of many staff. So far, management’s plans for restructuring remain vague, aside from a clear commitment to ‘restructure’ PS jobs in comms and marketing, IT and student administration. The last detail we have of specifics of any UoE wide plans are an 18 Sept. e-mail from Peter Mathieson and Kim Graham sent to all staff, entitled ‘Improving our ways of working’. Projects they have ‘approved’ to go forward are outlined below, with more detail in a sharepoint site accessible to staff.
Excerpt from 18 Sept. e-mail from SLT members
So far, management's plans for compulsory redundancies seem to involve devolving much of the process to the school level (within colleges and the corresponding unit level within the professional service groups). Each school/unit has been given a target for cuts in staff costs for 2025-26 and for 2026-27. In most schools and units, it is difficult to see how the targets can be met without either compulsory redundancies or significant adjustment of the budgetary targets.
Apparently, each school or unit would declare ‘pools’ of staff to be at-risk of redundancy, set selection criteria, and then use these criteria to select from within each pool the staff who will be made redundant. Recently, management has consulted the unions on an ‘academic contribution framework’, which would be used to determine the selection criteria for academics put into such pools in the schools.
The legally required consultation process allows the unions to raise concerns to which management must provide a response; although the unions have been clear in stating our opposition to redundancies, the consultation process does not give the unions the power to demand a stop to redundancies. The sad truth is that, for professional services staff (both within schools and in the professional services units), management has been running small scale redundancy programmes for years. These have also followed the model of pooling staff, determining selection criteria, and then using these criteria to select staff for redundancy. As part of management's plans to make £90m in staff cuts, the unions have already been consulted on the creation of pools covering a few dozen staff and leading to the loss of about a dozen jobs.
As noted above, management has indicated that they plan to consult on redundancies for professional services on a much larger scale, but they have not done so yet. The devolution of cuts to the school/unit level makes it particularly difficult to get a coherent view of what cuts are planned. Active union member reporting on what is happening locally is crucial to resisting redundancies.
Local cuts estimates
Management's presentations at the school, unit, college, and group level can be confusing but provide important information to understand what is happening. The key figures are the cut to spending on staff for 2025-26, the cut to spending on staff for 2026-27, and the baseline spending on staff in 2024-25. From these figures, it is possible to calculate the percentage cut in spending and to estimate the number of jobs that will be lost locally.[2]
There are many other figures that might be included in management presentations on local finances. These include total spending, the target cuts to total spending, other operating expenses (OOE, being all spending other than spending on staff), target cuts to OOE, and income. Some areas have also been reporting on ‘contribution’ and ‘contribution percentage’; the contribution of a school is the amount by which its income exceeds spending, and the contribution percentage is the contribution as a fraction of income. This ‘contribution’ is the net contribution to the overall finances of the university beyond local income and expenditure; it is, at least in part, used to cover important expenses such as providing and maintaining buildings, cleaning, running payroll, providing central IT support, libraries, time-tabling, and doing a lot of other work that does not directly generate tuition or research income.
Management's planned cuts will do enormous damage to the university. Not only will they not ‘improve our ways of working’ as they claim, they will further degrade working conditions and exacerbate already heavy workloads. With fewer staff, there will have to be cuts to the teaching, research, and other work for the public good that are the purpose of the university.
UoE management was wrong about the need for voluntary severance under Covid—with many staff having to be hired later to fill posts lost, at significant cost—and wrong about the need for USS pension cuts in 2022. Active and informed staff members, and joint union solidarity, are crucial in resisting these cuts.
Joint Unions Finance Working Group
17 October 2025
Endnotes
[1] The contribution reward system normally allows staff to apply for lump sum payments and increments on the pay scale in recognition of exceptional contribution to the University.
[2] One counter-intuitive but correct aspect of the way management calculates the amount to be cut from staff costs is that they estimate staff costs to grow by just over 4% in 2025-26 because of salary increases, so that there would have to be a 4% cut for the amount of spending to remain the same from 2024-25 to 2025-26. The figure of just over 4% arises from the 1.4% increase in the national pay scale that employers are imposing this year and from a further approximately 3% arising from the overwhelming majority of staff gaining an increment on the pay scale as a result of the revisions to the pay scale revision at UoE in 2024.
