The University of East Anglia (UEA) has proposed cutting over 160 full-time staff, including 22 from the faculty of science, in an effort to claw back £11 million and meet continued budget shortfalls.
The proposed cuts, which follow UEA targeting over 100 staff for voluntary redundancy in 2023 because of a projected £30 million deficit, have been met with anger by university staff, the majority of whom have voted in favour of strike action.
The news comes as universities right across the UK face ongoing financial uncertainty. At the end of January, Cardiff University proposed cutting 400 full-time employees from its academic workforce, with up to 10 coming specifically from chemistry. In January alone, over 1000 redundancies were proposed in the higher education sector.
The UEA plans, announced to staff at the end of January, will be carried out under three voluntary schemes: voluntary pay reduction for senior staff, unpaid career breaks and a voluntary redundancy scheme. However, a spokesperson for the university said that compulsory redundancies would ‘always be a last resort’.
In the faculty of medicine and health sciences, 26 full-time staff are at risk, while the faculty of science faces losing 22 and the faculty of arts and humanities are set to lose 17. The departments hardest hit by the redundancies are those in professional services, which is set to lose 97 full-time staff. The university has not yet released information regarding the breakdown of numbers for individual schools.
In 2024, the school of chemistry at UEA was merged with the school of pharmacy to create a larger school of chemistry, pharmacy and pharmacology. A current member of staff in this school, who did not want to be named, told Chemistry World that when the merger took place, staff were assured that their jobs were not at risk. However, they said that now 11 staff within this school were at risk under the new plans.
‘All these staff are either from the former chemistry department or those who taught chemistry-related material in the pharmacy department,’ the staff member said, adding that these members of staff had had individual consultations with the university last week. ‘The management have not shared any details of how staff at risk were selected, future plans for the department or why only chemistry facing staff were targeted, including those whose research is cross-disciplinary and capable of teaching pharmacy or pharmacology content,’ they added.
‘Regrettably, we need to identify savings of £11 million to stay on track with our financial sustainability plan,’ a spokesperson for UEA told Chemistry World. ‘These are not decisions that any of us want to be taking but, unfortunately, we must make them to secure UEA’s long-term future.’
The spokesperson explained that the university had concluded its collective trade union consultation phase on the proposals and will move to the next phase, which will involve individual consultations with staff in affected areas. ‘We remain committed to high-quality student education and experience and we will work hard to limit any impact on students,’ they added. ‘These incredibly challenging decisions have not been taken lightly and we recognise that this is really difficult news for our UEA community.’
On 6 February, the University and College Union (UCU) announced that, in response to the news, 82% of UEA staff had voted in favour of strike action following the highest turnout UEA UCU had ever achieved, reaching 67%. The UCU also revealed that 84% of staff had backed action short of a strike, which could consist of working to rule.
The union said that UEA’s management now needs to ‘begin meaningful negotiations to prevent compulsory redundancies if it wants to avoid industrial unrest’. ‘UEA staff have overwhelmingly backed strike action because they refuse to allow their colleagues to lose their livelihoods because of the financial turmoil management has caused,’ said UCU general secretary, Jo Grady. ‘This ballot result reflects the justified anger university staff feel over management’s failings, and university leadership now needs to start listening to their staff and work with us to avoid compulsory redundancies and further unrest on campus.’
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