Tag Archives: university lecturers’ strike

Young Liberals react to Universities strike

By Young Liberals | Mon 26th February 2018 - 12:35 pm

Teachers and professors are amongst the most trusted and respected professions in the UK, so says IPSOS Mori’s 2017 Veracity Index. Changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the pension scheme serving over 190,000 university staff in 92 higher education institutions, have shown no respect for lecturers and professors, alienating a huge number of academic staff and lowering morale on campus by asking them to do the same amount of work for less money.
Young Liberals, the youth and student wing of the Liberal Democrats, voted in their Winter Conference to support an emergency motion calling for Universities UK …

Posted in News | Also tagged university lecturers' strike and young liberals | 4 Comments

Vince: Government must act to secure university lecturers’ pensions

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 24th February 2018 - 12:23 pm

This smart little piece of digital magic sums up Vince Cable’s position on the university lecturers’ strike. He has called on the Government to underwrite the lecturers’ pension scheme.

.@vincecable has written to universities minister Sam Gyimah, calling on the government to underwrite the universities pension scheme in order to unblock the impasse that is causing the strikes by lecturers. Read Vince's full letter here > https://t.co/E4V9EqJv9T pic.twitter.com/PI0nRAJwU3

— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) February 24, 2018

The former Business Secretary, who was responsible for universities, called on the Government to intervene to stop lecturers being left up to £10,000 a year worse off in a letter to the current Universities Minister:

Dear Sam,
As you are aware, university lecturers have started 14 days of strikes due to drastic changes to their pensions. A lecturer can expect to be left around £10,000 a year worse off in retirement as a result. Younger lecturers will be the worst hit; it has been estimated they could lose up to half of their total retirement pot. Lecturers are not well paid; the reward for their hard work has largely been in the form of relatively generous packages, including a defined benefit pension.

There is a large deficit of around £6-7.5bn in the scheme, so some work clearly needs to be done to bring this down urgently. However, this does not necessitate the drastic action being taken – particularly given there are question marks over how the deficit has been calculated – notably a shift of the risk burden on to employees. Universities UK has shown few signs of being willing to compromise, which has led to an impasse that will harm the academic study of more than one million students.