VC–UUK–USS fact checker

Published: 25th November, 2019


Claim	Who, where, when?	LUCU fact-checker assessment	Comments
[USS] members voting ‘yes’ to strike action over pensions account for less than 10% of the scheme’s eligible membership.	USS employers (Universities UK), reported in the Guardian, 25 November (The Guardian )	Highly misleading	50,071 UCU members were asked whether they were willing to take industrial action in defence of #USS pensions; 21,034 said yes. That’s 42%. Only 5,510 – 11% – said no. (USS gets its misleading figure by dividing number of ‘yes’ votes by total number of USS members, approx. 230,000 – but most of these were not balloted.)
‘UCU rejected the offer from UUK that employers would pay an additional 0.5% in order to reduce the employee contribution to 9.1%, the level recommended by JEP’	University of Leicester VC, Nishan Canagarajah; email to all staff; Friday 22 November	Mixture of false and highly misleading	UCU did indeed reject this offer, but the 9.1% contribution level is a red herring: it relates to the flawed and widely criticised 2017 valuation. If the JEP methodology is applied to 2018 data, then the appropriate contribution rate is 8%. The big issue is the valuation: get this right (and USS hasn’t) and both employers and employees pay less. It’s very disappointing Leicester’s VC hasn’t understood this.
‘I am unable to deliver UCU’s demand for a pay increase of RPI +3%, ie 5.1%. Very few universities could afford such an increase without a significant impact on their employment levels.’	University of Leicester VC, Nishan Canagarajah; email to all staff; Friday 22 November	Misleading	The ‘unaffordability’ of a 5.1% pay rise is the result of senior management decisions to spend money elsewhere, e.g. ongoing infrastructure spending of £500m over a decade. By contrast, implementing UCU’s pay claim would cost less than £10m a year.