Collective Consultation Summary

UCU Report

Dear members,

In total, UNITE, Unison and UCU represented staff at seven formal Collective Consultation meetings between 11th June and 15th July. As the summaries of those meetings noted, the consultation was mostly productive and conducted in good faith. We worked with management to identify issues with the process and proposals and to raise member concerns.

Below, we update members on our core demands through consultation, their progress to date, our formal response to the Collective Consultation process and the next steps we anticipate. 

We can be pleased with what has been achieved but will continue to discuss concerns and issues with management in the coming weeks. As ever, we welcome feedback from members on the approach taken, and encourage everyone to vote as soon as possible in the current ballot on industrial action to strengthen our hand in future negotiations.

In solidarity,

Sussex UCU Exec

Our demands and progress

Throughout consultation and in our response, we focused on four key demands:

1. To extend timelines to provide more time to consider staff proposals submitted in consultation and seek alternatives to compulsory redundancies
2. To revisit current spending and exhaust all other options for financial savings before job cuts (including senior executive pay cuts) 
3. To provide a fairer deal and stronger support to those leaving the University
4. To work with staff and unions post-consultation to address the workload crisis and lobby for sector-wide change 

There has been some movement on each of these through the consultation process:

The university has already pushed back timelines from the initial plans, with more time for us to find voluntary solutions to the current crisis. We will continue to argue for compulsory redundancies to be ruled out until 31st July 2027 (as per our branch demand), and wish to avoid the current proposals, in which potential redundancy decisions would be made and communicated before the festive break, with leaving dates scheduled mid-semester.

We continue to discuss executive pay cuts and non-pay savings with management, including on greater transparency in these costs. We have also, reluctantly, offered to explore progressive pay uplift delays and promotion freezes if such measures save jobs and are matched by commitments from University leadership. We have offered to discuss this in the spirit of exhausting all other options before job cuts. 

We will continue to push for better terms and support for those leaving the University and are pleased with the opening of VL2026, which offers a better severance deal for some. We note that for some members this will be a worse deal than voluntary redundancy, so encourage everyone considering this option to use the calculators provided in central communications.

Finally, we have agreed to a listening exercise on workloads to be conducted after consultation. This will be an important chance to highlight the additional stresses on workload that have been created in recent years. We encourage members to flag areas of their work or admin that they think should be rethought or removed.

Our formal response

UCU and Unite chose to submit a joint response, with Unison submitting separately, but with all in agreement over issues raised. Our response was not exhaustive, but focused on providing evidence for our core demands and providing the basis for further informed negotiations on the issues raised. The response was complemented by the many detailed rebuttals from units and staff interest groups from across campus, whose work we will continue to flag and discuss with University management. 

The response was broken down into four sections:  

Section One responded to the overall financial picture. In it, we provided our reasoning and evidence for pushing back the timelines for any redundancies. We identified financial headroom and highlighted areas where further savings could be made, including non-pay costs, executive pay, and potential progressive promotion, and pay uplift freezes. We also commented on the proposed voluntary permanent reduction of hours scheme.

Section Two highlighted key issues within the individual Business Change Documents. These ranged from minor errors in need of correction to larger problems with the assumptions and justifications provided. We also requested full changes to the documents and leadership processes for the DSE and MAH BCDs.  

Section Three provided our response to the redundancy offers currently proposed by the University. In it, we highlighted the areas where these offers could be improved to both protect employees in an increasingly difficult labour market and to make voluntary offers as attractive as possible, so as to avoid compulsory redundancies. We also provided feedback on the selection process and the training and support that should be made available to staff through this process.

Finally, Section Four offered a roadmap to a sustainable and collaborative rebuilding process, with a credible path forward for student number recovery. Here, we identified some of the issues with student number forecasting and suggested ways to engage staff in plans to offer a differentiated University experience at Sussex. We believe this is critical in bringing the campus community back together after multiple gruelling rounds of job losses and dwindling morale. This section also proposed specific actions to address the ongoing workload crisis facing employees.

What happens next

As communicated by the University, management will now take time to review all of the responses from staff, with decisions on revised BCDs to be made by 9th September. We will continue to meet with the management through the next steps of the process to help feed in further ideas, evidence and options for savings. 

As a union, we also need to be focused on ensuring a strong response to our ballot on industrial action. We remain committed to avoiding industrial action while negotiations continue in good faith, but it is more important than ever for the University to hear clearly that we will stand up for colleagues’ jobs if needs be. 

Our strategic communications group will continue to work on building support for our demands and raising awareness of the crisis facing universities across the UK. We welcome more members getting involved in this and other union work.