University of Huddersfield redundancies: Second wave in 12 months hits university staff

As students celebrate their graduation ceremonies, university staff have this week received crushing news of compulsory redundancies. So far, it has been announced that 15 members of staff are at risk across the departments of Design and the Built Environment and Music and Design Arts as the university ‘re-aligns its workforce.’

Last month, it was reported a Voluntary Severance Scheme (VSS) was in place at the university, with staff across all departments asked to come forward. There were fears that there would be another wave of compulsory redundancies, as is now the case, should an insufficient number of staff come forward.

A representative from the trade union, UNISON, previously explained that take up of the VSS is understood to be “unusually low” and the total number of redundancies across the entire university is anticipated to be into three figures.

A spokesperson for Huddersfield University said: “We continue to ensure that our staff community and our estate are fit for our current and future growth plans, and in line with the courses we offer and the research we are undertaking, for example we are undertaking a significant expansion in health related courses. From time to time there is a need to re-align our workforce, and we always try voluntary measures as a first step.

“Currently in our School of Arts and Humanities we have a situation where we need to reduce our staffing levels by a very small number. Thanks to efforts to mitigate this through redeployment and other steps we confidently expect the number of redundancies to be much lower than 15.”

The School of Arts and Humanities was last in the firing line in June 2022 when 37 redundancies were announced.

The current wave of redundancies is taking place against the backdrop of recent multi-million-pound investment into new university buildings, leading some to ask the question of whether the university ‘values its buildings more than its staff.’

Previously, a spokesperson for Huddersfield’s University and College Union (UCU) said: “Historically, Huddersfield has been a university with high student satisfaction and excellent graduate outcomes. We are fighting to ensure that it remains so in the future, providing access to quality higher education for the local community.

“It is such a shame that the management of the university does not recognise these efforts and treats staff so poorly. The management would rather sit on millions of pounds of reserves and spend money on buildings than recognise and reward the outstanding efforts of their staff.”