Staff at Brunel University London received an email from the VC on the 24th of October introducing plans for a “significant academic resizing programme”, claiming that current financial pressures make it necessary to “resize the university to the position we were in prior to the growth in international postgraduate students over the last five years or so”. In less woolly language, the plan is for 130 FT academic positions to be made redundant, i.e. 14% reduction in academic staffing levels.

In the context of the regular Staff Consultation Committee (SCC) meetings Brunel UCU has with Brunel management, we were provided with an agenda last Friday afternoon (18.10.24) that included the item “academic staffing levels”. In response to this, we repeatedly asked for information and documentation associated with this agenda item, and finally received a business case late afternoon 23.10.24, for a meeting scheduled 9:30am 24.10.24. There has been no consultation or negotiation with Brunel UCU on this business case and we raised several serious concerns about the business case in this meeting, including but not limited to the financial justification for the proposal and the Student to Staff Ratio method used.

This latest plan comes on top of a currently-underway significant restructure involving the centralisation of Brunel’s professional services (the so-called Target Operating Model) which will result in significant job losses amongst professional service staff at Brunel.

Brunel UCU has not been consulted on these plans and does not accept Brunel’s claims about the inevitability of these redundancies. We will fight to avoid redundancies.