Report from NEC, 14th March 2025

By UCU Commons NEC members

Key takeaways:

• President remains steadfast on dealing with bad behaviour
• NEC approves subs and budget to Congress
• Usual bad faith questioning and undermining of the General Secretary

A calendared meeting of the National Executive Committee, which deals with cross-sectoral business and is composed of some 60 reps from HE and FE, took place in hybrid format on 14th March 2025.

This year has seen UCU’s first Black president, Maxine Looby from the FE sector, chairing our NEC. We have witnessed the thinly-veiled misogyny, racism and ableism to which she has been subjected, but she has not missed a beat in dealing with disruption, bad-faith questioning and downright abuse, even going so far as to exclude a member at the last NEC. To this end, NEC members were emailed a document four days in advance of this meeting, entitled ‘Risk management: a statement of Chair’s intentions for UCU UK committee meetings’. This is because it is believed, by many of us who attend these meetings and the President, that our meetings present a health and safety risk to staff and lay reps alike. UCU Commons members have reported feelings of anxiety, heart palpitations, IBS, and other stress-related symptoms after attending these meetings, and so we welcomed the document, as there are no clear rules on dealing with this sort of toxicity in our decision-making spaces.

The document contained a clear summary of potential problems followed by a list of actions that would be taken in specific circumstances to protect staff – UCU after all having a legal duty to do so as an employer. The document was not for discussion, as the President is responsible for chairing NEC and is perfectly entitled to set out their intentions for dealing with these situations. Unfortunately, members of UCU Left and Rank and File insisted on questioning the legitimacy of the document, demanding that we convene another meeting to discuss its contents, and even going so far as to suggest it would be terrible if our employers saw the document because they would use it against us. UCU Commons member Jo Edge stated that UCU NEC and HEC meetings were among the most toxic spaces she had sat in, and that if we do not want employers to know just how horrible our meetings are, then we should simply begin to make them more convivial and constructive.

The President handled perfidious questions admirably and we moved on to the actual business of the meeting. We began with approving the minutes of the previous NEC meeting on 15 November 2024. Some discussion was had around whether the name of the member ejected for falsely claiming that a member of staff was acting in a discriminatory way should be included in the minutes. In the end, a vote was taken, and the UCU Left-dominated NEC voted to remove the name of the member by 26 votes to 23, with 3 abstentions.

Discussion then moved on to budgetary matters to be approved at Congress at the end of May. Usually, the Strategy and Finance Committee (SFC, a subcommittee of NEC that is responsible for considering strategic and financial matters and making recommendations to NEC) would recommend a budget and subscription rates to NEC to in turn send to Congress, however, the UCU Left- dominated SFC had failed to do this. At that meeting, it had apparently been agreed that SFC members who had an issue with the Head of Finance’s outlined budget and subs rate should email him with suggestions before NEC in order for these to be incorporated. None of them did so. Commons member Mark Pendleton, one of a tiny number of non-UCU Left/Rank & File members currently sitting on SFC, had castigated the SFC majority for failing to do their jobs in that meeting, The fact that none did so afterwards reinforced his position and is, in our view, a gross abdication of responsibility, especially as we are in a time of unprecedented financial crisis in our sectors. In the absence of reps doing their job, the Head of Finance had to speculate on what their concerns may be, and came up with three alternative subs rates for the next year, in the hope that NEC would vote for one option.

We voted to approve the appointment of auditors and audited accounts to go to Congress. We were then presented with the three budgetary options, all of which continued our move towards more progressive subscriptions, albeit at varying degrees of pace. The Head of Finance made the point that we do rely heavily – as we should – on contributions from our more highly paid members to carry the bulk of the financial weight of our union's costs, but we do need to remain cautious that we don't move too far or too fast, to ensure that we retain these members. That view failed to carry the day, and NEC voted to select an option that would increase subscriptions by between 2 and 3.5% on our top three bands of membership, and bring down the subscription rates by 3.5% for our fourth band. Lower levels remained largely unchanged. It is worth pointing out that these bands are representative of total annual income, so not pro-rata equivalent salary for those on part-time contracts, which is obviously important. The budget and subs voted on at NEC will now go to Congress for ratification.

After a lunch break we heard from our General Secretary, Jo Grady, in her usual report to NEC, which has been recorded and will be available on the UCU website for members to listen to in the near future. A lengthy question and answer session from reps followed, which was the usual mix of constructive discussion about the problems facing our sector, and bad faith and downright patronising comments about, for example, the GS’s knowledge of FE. The rally and parliamentary lobby of 18 March was discussed, with members of UCU Left declaring it would be a ‘washout’ (it wasn’t), stating that no comms had been issued on the event (they had, in the Friday email, Branch Officers’ Update, etc).

We then heard from the Head of Equality about UCU’s review into racism, which is being paused until the dispute with the staff union, Unite, is resolved.

NEC then voted to advise the Standing Orders and Rules Working Group (SORG, a subcommittee of NEC) to: ‘Amend the standing orders to specifically allow PGRs who are in full membership (but without qualifying employment) to serve on advisory committees (but no other members without qualifying employment)’, which came out of the work of the PGRs as Staff campaign. This means that PhD student members without qualifying employment would be able to have voting rights on our Equality Standing Committees, ARPS, Climate and Ecological Emergency and Anti-Casualisation committees, for example. This will be reviewed by SORG and, if found to be workable, will come back to a future NEC meeting for ratification.

The meeting closed with an update from the Head of Campaigns, who has been working around the clock on the Stop the Cuts campaign.

NEC is not sending any motions to this year’s Congress, which we do not see as a bad thing. Congress is always flooded with motions from branches and various committees, and it would be nice to get through all the business for once.