10 Frequently Asked Questions on Statute 18
Summary: Defending safeguards for academic work at UCL!
UCL management want to reduce Statute 18 protections in disciplinary processes for academic staff. They want to follow a model (from Warwick) where a small panel decides who gets the full due process rights of the Statute in cases where dismissal is a possibility.
These rights include a full tribunal hearing with a panel composed of Academic Board, Council, and management, a right to legal representation, and an appeals process chaired by an independent, experienced legal professional. In these FAQs we answer key questions about what is going on and why UCL UCU is fundamentally opposed (as per branch policy) to the removal of these rights and why we encourage all members to be involved in defending them.
We have fought for Statute 18 rights to be extended to all those carrying out academic work at UCL, but after the Academic Board has started a process in this direction, management want to gut these rights of all meaning.
Questions about the claimed ‘elitism’ of Statute 18 or the allegation that Statute 18 protects sexual harassers are addressed below. Much of this comes from our direct experience in defending numerous colleagues at UCL from management.
1. What is statute 18?
2. Why such special safeguards? What does Statute 18 do for me?
3. Isn’t Statute 18 just a charter for safeguarding privileged white men and abusers?
4. Who does not like Statute 18 safeguards?
5. What are management proposing to do?
6. Should we be concerned?
7. What is wrong with the management proposals?
8. Is Statute 18 capable of improvement?
9. Is Statute 18 just for an elite?
10. Is it all over for Statute 18? What can I do about this?
1 – What is statute 18?
At its most basic, Statute 18 is a set of rights for academic staff that safeguard a strong level of due process when they face disciplinary actions that can be career-ending. They do this by placing significant requirements on Management in matters of disciplinary and redundancy procedures in particular. In disciplinary processes, serious disciplinary charges that might lead to dismissal will involve a formal hearing with a special tribunal panel (made up of representatives from Council, Management and the Academic Board), the accused having the right to legal representation, and an appeals process that must be chaired by an independent senior lawyer.
These rights are enshrined in UCL’s Statutes, which are effectively UCL’s ‘Constitution’. They can only be changed by Council seeking agreement from the King’s Privy Council (unlike standard HR policies). The Statute18 disciplinary procedure provides a higher level of procedural protection than standard disciplinary policies.
2 – Why such special safeguards? What does Statute 18 do for me?
These safeguards are crucial for academic workers. This is both because of the myriad of pressures that can arise to remove academics, personal, internal, and political, and because disciplinary actions leading to dismissal or even reprimands for academics can be career-ending in a profession where reputation is crucial , and in which the professional commitment is a life-long, job-specific and exclusive personal investment.
Standard disciplinary processes have few safeguards against managers who might seek to remove ‘inconvenient’ members of staff. The law generally permits employers to dismiss staff through disciplinary procedures even if they are not actually guilty of anything. The legal standard is the civil one of ‘balance of probabilities’, not criminal proof (‘beyond reasonable doubt’). An employer can simply argue that their disciplinary panel believed that the employee was a risk to the business, or they ‘probably’ did the thing they were accused of. But the premise for allowing these weaker processes is that this sanction is not permanent, and another employer may freely re-employ them. This contrasts with managerial decisions that can end a colleague’s career in the academy more widely.
Colleagues may think such misuses of disciplinary action are unlikely or rare in a university, but time and again UCU has seen cases of managers fishing for, or encouraging, complaints (sometimes on the flimsiest grounds) against staff in order to put them through a disciplinary process. UCL’s standard disciplinary procedures, for the reasons mentioned above, have allowed some egregious unfair decisions, including decisions that were reviewed by Employment Tribunals and the EAT and found to be in breach of trade union and human rights legislation (see UCL v Brown EAT). In a university with over 50,000 students and 18,000 staff, encouraging, or worse, finding in favour of untrue allegations is an increased risk.
Academic staff need to be free to speak out and freely debate matters ranging from their subject discipline to the functioning of their institutions. Without safeguards against disciplinary processes being weaponised against them, that freedom becomes precarious. A process to safeguard against this for academic workers at the frontline of engagement in teaching and research environments is crucial. Activities such as fostering research groups, building subject reputation, developing academic community, prolonged academic inquiry and pursuit of life long projects and their transmission in teaching — need special protections, and are vulnerable in an environment of reduced safeguards. Statute 18 safeguards academic freedom both in terms of freedom of expression and freedom to perform research. We need to be able to defend the principle of a university understood as an academic community with buffers against cases motivated by personal vendettas or the hounding of those deemed inconvenient, — even where the case does not have ‘Academic Freedom’ written all over it.
3 – Isn’t Statute 18 just a charter for safeguarding privileged white men and abusers?
Statute 18 offers a higher standard of procedure in disciplinary cases that we think should apply to everyone. If there is evidence of anyone committing abuse against anyone else, that evidence would be put to the test in a legally competent manner.
All campus trade unions, including UCU, uphold a zero tolerance policy for bullying and harassment, including and especially, sexual harassment. Our members are frequent victims of bullying and harassment. We spend our time defending the weaker members of our community against the stronger, more established, more senior members – especially those in management.
We do not believe that justice is served by short cuts. Rather we think zero tolerance applies to everyone. If a student is harassed by a staff member they should get justice. So should staff harassed by managers, managers harassed by staff, and staff by students. The problem is that disciplinary procedures are not neutral – they are in the hands of senior managers, who decide who should be subject to them. That is why procedural safeguards protect the weak.
Statute 18 does not make anyone ‘unsackable’, and in the past Statute18 tribunals have resulted in disciplinary sanctions and academics leaving UCL. Statute18 simply ensures that evidence is scrutinised by a genuinely independent Tribunal and Appeal hearing, and that anyone accused of misconduct is entitled to legal representation. These are basic procedural fairness rights that are essential for academics (regardless of sex, race, age, and social background) to perform their chosen profession. Everyone is entitled to a fair process. Indeed, as Dostoevsky famously remarked, we measure our level of civilisation by how we treat the guilty.
It is also worth noting, as set out in this legal opinion by Lord Hendy KC (one of the most eminent employment law authorities in the UK), that Statute 18 safeguards are not unusually strong or out of place when compared to other professions. Wherever disciplinary actions have the power to be career-ending, stronger safeguards are required.
4 – Who does not like Statute 18 safeguards?
For a number of years UCL HR, supported by senior management, have been publicly trying to get rid of Statute 18. In 2012, they proposed changes which would effectively nullify most of the Statute, including making redundancies easier as well as scrapping the special disciplinary protections. Statute 18 stands in the way of a university management “reshaping” itself by sacking staff, as is currently happening in universities around the UK.
The real value of Statute 18 is that it protects staff against being targeted by a Head of Department, Dean, or higher member of UCL management. Where a relationship breaks down between a staff member and a Head of Department, or where there are incentives to remove ‘inconvenient’ colleagues because of their views, research, internal voicing of criticism, or even personal reasons, those not protected by Statute 18 are frequently pushed out.
Although the Disciplinary Procedure is not generally used to reduce staff numbers – it is too complicated for the most part – UCU has seen cases where staff not protected by Statute 18 have been dismissed on other grounds, such as declining to work all of the time in the UK, or disagreements about which days they might work in a clinic!
UCU has also consistently challenged the use of contractors, who cannot be subject to any disciplinary procedure. Thus in the Architecture Faculty until recently, substantial numbers of staff were not given contracts of employment and were not as a result subject to a disciplinary procedure.
The Management myth is that Statute 18 is effectively ‘a charter’ for sexual harassers and abusers to avoid the consequences of their offences. The latest version of this myth was stated at an EDI Community of Practice even on UCL’s EDI Strategic Plan (10/03/25), where one of the management-side EDI officers, presenting, said that Statute 18 was being changed because some staff at UCL are not experiencing the consequences of their harmful behaviours. A manager on UCL’s Education Committee even stated that Statute 18 prevents UCL getting good teaching expertise.
Management is promoting a myth that is not backed up by evidence. The fact is that there are relatively few disciplinary cases where sexual harassment is alleged. It is not true that UCL has dismissed such numbers of alleged sexual harassers with the standard disciplinary procedure (that applies to over 15,000 staff), which might show an expected incidence in the staff population which somehow cannot be addressed among academic staff (3,400 staff).
It might be argued that even if other university staff are not guilty of harassment, perhaps academics are such a bastion of prestige they believe themselves above the law. But universities like Oxford that changed their procedures in the way that UCL envisages have not seen large numbers of sexual harassers being sacked.
In fact, the protections are modest. Where management have concerns about any staff member the procedure is similar if not identical – unless there is evidence of a sackable offence, which triggers the Tribunal process. Academic staff can be given warnings, up to and including a two-year final written warning, by a procedure with a single senior manager. Indeed, for staff not covered by Statute 18 the maximum warning duration is shorter: 18 months for a final written warning.
There is no evidence that Statute 18 disciplinary procedures are used and abused (or can be used and abused) by bad actors. Instead, as we have seen time and again, the tribunals are a forum for due process and have acted for BAME colleagues, women colleagues, LGBTQ+ colleagues, and disabled colleagues, who face action that has been ultimately demonstrated as unwarranted. In recent cases at the Bartlett, where charges that led to up to 2 year suspensions for colleagues, turned out to be ill-founded (in one case where a colleague was accused of an action at an event where they were not, or could not be present). No heads rolled among the administrators and managers that brought these devastating cases, and colleagues would have been much more likely pushed out and forced to go to an Employment Tribunal, were it not for the Statute 18 Tribunal and its scrutiny.
In this way Statute 18 also acts as a filter, generally preventing poorly founded cases having to go to Employment Tribunals for justice.
5 – What are management proposing to do?
A management-created committee (the ‘Task and Finish Group on Disciplinary Reform’) has produced a proposal that has little support in the academic community at UCL. Their proposal is to abandon academic protections for staff engaged in academic work with academic contracts, but to offer the idea that the more substantive process be brought back in for exceptions where members can first prove that their case is ‘an academic freedom one’. The idea is the decision will be made by yet another Panel – its composition as yet undetermined – by criteria as yet undetermined.
Leaving aside whether adding an extra process will ‘streamline’ cases or slow them down, an obvious question is whether it is possible to make a proper and fair decision in advance of hearing a case about if and how academic freedom is involved. The Task and Finish Group simply assumes it is, the management representatives on it being unable to answer the question.
Instead of addressing this question, which of course risks being fatal to the entire proposal, they propose to convince Council to establish the principle of a split process and then worry about the details later!
This is a fundamental error. Both Statute 18 and the recent Higher Education and Research Act 2017 define ‘academic freedom’ as engaging both freedom of speech (‘to question received wisdom’) and freedom to perform research (‘to test’ it).
Whereas we might easily recognise an allegation about free speech to be an academic freedom matter, the only way to protect the freedom to perform research (including access to specialist work spaces, equipment, and networks of collaboration) is to protect academic research workers by a stronger and more rigorous process. (It is worth noting that we already have an extensive research misconduct process, but allegations about personal conduct in the context of research projects and collaborations are not subject to it.)
Universities are the principal places in the UK where independent publicly-funded, publicly-accountable research takes place. UCL is a research-intensive university which employs over three and a half thousand research staff alongside a similar number of academics. Science is increasingly under threat from politicians and public figures that deny it, and AI algorithms that may be misused to hallucinate results. We should be strengthening and extending protections for research workers, not removing them.
6 – Should we be concerned?
Yes! See the next section.
7 – What is wrong with the management proposals?
- It is not possible to distinguish academic freedom from non-academic freedom cases simply by looking at the subject matter of a case. Consider a case where a senior manager spends months encouraging complaints from students and colleagues in a department in order to remove a member of staff. The allegations themselves are presented as ones of poor conduct, so surely this does not engage academic freedom? But the entire process is an attack on academic freedom of both the accused and their colleagues. First, it aims to remove the targeted staff member from their research and/or teaching, potentially ending their academic career altogether. Second, it threatens other staff who witness this campaign not to step out of line. Where safeguards against such cases are reduced, it produces an atmosphere of fear and censure that is a direct attack on academic freedom and the sense of academic community that is part of it. Colleagues will fear researching, teaching, or engaging in public discussion of issues that might bring this kind of attention to them. These cases, which are not uncommon, create a ‘chilling effect’ on academic freedom in the university.
- Neither in the Warwick model (or its close cousin, the Oxford model) are clear criteria set out for what constitutes a genuine academic freedom case. This is left, effectively, to the arbitrary judgement of a secret panel that decides if an academic worker should have access to these due process safeguards. As noted above, this is based on a fundamental misconception about academic freedom, namely that it is about free speech. But academic freedom is about freedom to perform academic work. It is obviously threatened by any environment where managers can fish for complaints to initiate proceedings against academic workers they find inconvenient. The Statute 18 Tribunal system, with the legal representation and scrutiny involved, helps to filter out such procedural abuses. The current situation is not perfect (see below), but the management proposal would remove these safeguards altogether.
- Without clear and transparent criteria for what count as distinctly academic freedom cases, any decisions by a panel ‘filtering out’ who gets Statute 18 safeguarding rights and who does not will be arbitrary, and so lacking in due process.
- These proposals were produced by HR and other management members of the Task and Finish group. The non-management representatives (2 elected from the Academic Board, plus a UCU observer) were entirely against this proposal. But their objections and input were effectively ignored.
- The Task and Finish Group was supposedly created to address disciplinary policies generally and the Academic Board were promised it was not set up to attack Statute 18. However, this seems to have been its main purpose.
- The proposal will lengthen disciplinary processes, not streamline them. One of the justifications for the Task and Finish Group’s work was that it was supposed to be looking at ways of reducing the timescale of disciplinary processes, but these proposals add an additional procedural obstacle in disciplinary cases. The academic freedom panel’s decision will be procedurally profound, so there must also be the right to appeal that decision. It may also be required again, at the Appeal stage of the process. The idea that this is ‘streamlining’ disciplinary processes is obviously false!
By contrast, there is strong agreement from academic staff and unions that investigation processes – which currently last as long as 2 years in some cases – should be improved. The courts expect staff to be suspended no more than 3 months, but at UCL suspensions while investigations take place can go on for years.
8 – Is Statute 18 capable of improvement?
Yes, Statute 18 can be improved. But improvements are not made by removing procedural safeguards . Instead they should be strengthened by addressing missing Regulations that management have ignored. The Statute states that there will be Regulations for its procedures, but these Regulations were never written! Such Regulations would set out time limits and transparent rules (e.g., for calling witnesses or how investigations are conducted). But since its adoption in UCL Statutes in 1988, no Regulations have been proposed or produced. This is a massive failure in due process, and an act of negligence on the part of UCL management, UCL HR, and UCL Legal Counsel, and has allowed attempted abuses of a fair procedure (e.g., suspending staff, with a ban on contacting anyone at UCL, for over a year; refusals to accept witnesses a defendant puts forward, or – at best – accepting witnesses only at the last minute, making it difficult to produce them; striking out evidence the management does not like; refusing grounds of appeal, etc).
We are aware that the Academic Board Working Group on Statute 18 has produced draft regulations to fix the worst excesses allowed by their absence. These were deemed more than adequate by one of the most prominent employment lawyers in the UK, Lord Hendy KC, who provided a Brief on this. However, management have refused to put these in place, and Council has backed them in this, delaying the matter until they receive the proposals from the management Task and Finish group.
9 – Is Statute 18 just for an elite?
UCL divides its workforce into various groups. At the top is senior management, with a pyramid of management structures running divisions, faculties and departments, down to the level of academic PIs running research groups. Academic staff (as defined by the Statute by title) are not the elite in the university, but they are given more rights than research, teaching and academic-related and professional services staff.
Disciplinary processes are almost exclusively for use by managers against lower-graded staff. They are, for this reason, a focus of managerial power over colleagues. They are not the same as grievance procedures, where staff make complaints about how they are treated at work – including in some cases, complaints of bullying and harassment.
The different rights afforded by Statute 18 can make it appear to many researchers, professional services staff and “teaching-only” staff that the university treats them as lesser mortals, placed on more insecure contracts than academics, subject to being disposable in redundancy and with weaker safeguards in disciplinary proceedings. So why defend these processes?
But staff excluded from Statute 18 protections at the moment have an obvious interest in defending these safeguards for academic staff, for two reasons. First, because this provides the potential, and the moral pressure, for extending these safeguards, and second, because when academics are targeted, other staff may be badly affected. In one recent case, a Research Fellow lost her job, in another, an entire research group was thrown into disarray, both occurring when PIs were suspended (neither were ultimately dismissed).
Most importantly, in dissuading the use of gross misconduct disciplinary measures unless management have a strongly-founded case, Statute 18 currently safeguards all those designated academic staff. UCU believes it should be extended as widely as possible without being watered down.
Improving procedures has an important racial justice dimension. Research into racial selection bias in Higher Education disciplinary cases has been relatively limited. In a literature review for the Equality Challenge Unit, Leathwood, et al (2009) reported that in the Division of Nursing at the University of Bradford 10 out of 12 cases over a six-year period were directed against Black and minority ethnic staff.
But there is considerable evidence from comparable professions. NHS England reported in 2016 that there was variation between trusts, but in London, Black and ethnic minority staff were twice as likely to be subject to formal disciplinary procedures than White British staff. Sadly, this type of selection bias appears true at UCL, although the total number of gross misconduct cases a year are few, making data difficult to collate. Disabled staff may also find themselves targeted.
At the same time, large sections of the academic workforce at UCL who do the same kind of work as those that UCL designates ‘academic staff’, are not covered by Statute 18. UCL has maintained a two-tier workforce by designating some colleagues as ‘teaching only’ or ‘research only’ staff, and underplaying the academic contribution of academic-related and professional staff, whereas the Statutes have always stated that Statute 18 applies to ‘academic’ staff (those whose contracts mandate teaching and research as core activities). This is a serious injustice, and one that UCU has long campaigned over. But the solution is not to weaken academic protections but to extend and strengthen them!
UCL’s Academic Board passed a motion in October 2024 that sought to remedy this injustice. It instructed AB’s Working Group on Statute 18 to bring forward proposals to extend full Statute 18 rights on Disciplinary and Redundancy procedures to teaching and research staff. The Provost declared at the Academic Board that he did not know why this had not happened already. But the irony is that, at the very moment in which proposals are being worked on to extend these rights to all academic workers, management are pushing to remove the substance of these rights. It is in all our interests to defend these Statute 18 safeguards, rather than seeing them watered down with a purely nominal extension of the Statute to all.
10 – Is it all over for Statute 18? What can I do about this?
It is by no means over. The Academic Board must advise on this, and Council will make decisions, but UCU will at the same time gather the opposition to these detrimental changes and refuse to accept them.
You can make a difference.
Please attend UCU meetings on Statute 18 and get involved in the campaign to defend and extend it. If you are on the Academic Board, please support motions against management proposals to adopt proposals to undermine the statute, such as adopting the Warwick Model (or its close cousin the Oxford Model) that will place arbitrary obstacles on accessing Statute 18 rights.
If there is any question you would like answered here about Statute 18 protections, please let us know and we will do our best to add it.
References
Archibong, U. and Darr, A. (2010). The involvement of black and minority ethnic staff in the NHS disciplinary proceedings. Centre for Inclusion and Diversity University of Bradford.
Leathwood, C., Maylor, U. and Moreau, M.P. (2009). The experience of black and minority ethnic staff working in higher education. Equality Challenge Unit: London