UCU Negotiators Q&A about the new Consultative Ballot – Friday 25 July, 2-3.30pm on Zoom

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UCU has this week launched its Consultative Ballot regarding the Higher Education employers’ national offer. 

  • Tomorrow, Friday 25 July, 2-3.30pm, UCU national negotiators are holding a Q&A event about this
  • Please register by 11am on Friday (see email for details)
Voting in this consultation

UCU Head Office sent a circular email on Monday, with the subject line: “IMPORTANT: UCU higher education pay and working conditions consultative ballot”. This email contains your own personal voting link. Please check your inboxes for this.

This consultation closes at 5 pm on Friday 15 August. 

UCU’s Higher Education Committee has voted to call on members to REJECT the offer and to vote YES to industrial action.

What is at stake

1. A pay cut – and the lowest pay offer in the public sector

The employers are offering a pay increase of 1.4%. Yet current figures are CPI 3.6%, CPIH 4.1%, and RPI 4.4%. This translates into a real-terms one year pay cut of as much as 3% – unless, miraculously, inflation falls between now and August.

The result is we have lost as much money in the last four years (2021-2025) as over the previous ten (a 20% pay cut from 2008 to 2021). 

2. Nothing on offer to defend jobs or challenge the funding model

UCEA has offered nothing tangible to address the current HE jobs crisis. Their representatives agreed to dust off some documents, but they won’t even make recommendations to their members to avoid job losses. They say it is a decision for each VC. 

The employers have refused joint campaigning for the sector with the trade unions. Instead, Universities UK lobbied the Government for even higher tuition fees, and were turned away. The Government told UUK to ‘get their own house in order’ – interpreted as a green light for job cuts.

UCL UCU has already discussed and agreed initiating a dispute with the Education Secretary. We aren’t employed by the Government, but we want it to help address the problems in HE. The sector is in a crisis of the tuition fee+loan model. Vice Chancellors gambled on expansion at the expense of staff. Now that the boom is turning to bust, we need to stand together.

3. Building the campaign and fighting for the future of our sector

Your union branch, UCL UCU, has offered solidarity with branches which are already taking action. But we know that we cannot effectively defend the sector by taking action in individual branches, branch by branch.  We need UK-wide action.

All five trade unions (UCU, UNITE, UNISON, GMB and EIS) have agreed to coordinate consultation with union members over the offer, and to plan to position ourselves to take joint action across the sector in the autumn. 

For more information see https://www.ucu.org.uk/heconsultation2025 and https://www.ucu.org.uk/he2025 

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