The Universities UK (UUK) board has put forward a proposal aimed at resolving the pension dispute. This has been sent to University and College Union (UCU) members, along with a message from Sally Hunt, UCU general secretary.

This is a big improvement on the last deal – and shows how important the strike action has been, in moving us from a situation six weeks ago where we were definitely going to lose defined benefit pensions to a new scenario where all the planned changes are off the table. And a new jointly agreed expert panel is to be set up to oversee the future approach to USS.

At the same time, it’s far from perfect and offers no guarantees that we won’t be back in the same position come April 2019.

I can’t summarise the deal without potentially misrepresenting it, but here are some interesting blog posts on the subject:

As we said before the strike, this will affect everyone, whether you are in SAUL or USS. It would be great to have people’s opinions (especially as if the deal is rejected more strikes are planned for late April).

Some of you are also in UCU, and so will be feeding back already, but anyone who has a view please let me know. UCU’s higher education committee is meeting on Wednesday (28 March), and I would like to let the Senate House branch know in advance what IWGB members think about the pension offer and about supporting UCU in further strike action.

We will also be discussing this at tomorrow’s (28 March) branch meeting at Senate House, south block, lower mezzanine room, 12.30pm.

Danny Millum
Branch Secretary
University of London IWGB
https://iwgb-universityoflondon.org/