President's weekly update
15 March 2019
Senior colleagues and I travelled to MIPIM (Le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier) in the South of France, one of the largest property conferences in the world, with a big contingent from the Manchester city region. The reason was to launch the search for a development partner for our North Campus. This now has a working name of Innovation District Manchester (ID Manchester) since it is not in the North of the city and won’t be a campus. Aside from the pretty bad travel out there (aborted landing and a lot of people ill), the event went extremely well.
Our event on the excellent Manchester stand was absolutely packed. I spoke about our University’s plans for the site; Colin Thomasson from CBRE, a real estate advisory service which has been working with us on this, explained the potential; and Joanne Roney, CEO of Manchester City Council, talked about the excitement and impact for Manchester. We then joined a panel with Diana Hampson, our Director of Estates and Facilities, which was chaired by our Finance Director, Steve Dauncey, to take questions. There was a great deal of interest and we were billed as the highlight of the conference! You can see a film that describes ID Manchester on our University YouTube channel.
Our University has become the 5,000th organisation to become accredited by the Living Wage Foundation (LWF). We have paid all our staff above the LWF rate for quite a long time and offer generous conditions but have only recently applied to be accredited. Yesterday we published our annual gender pay gap report. This year the median pay gap has shrunk a little from 13.1% to 12.0%, though there has been a small increase in the mean from 17.1% to 18.4%. We are taking a number of actions to reduce the gap as well as working to increase equality and diversity.
I co-hosted an event at the House of Commons with Lord Gadhia to seek support for the South Asia Gallery at our Manchester Museum. After I spoke about the University, Esme Ward, Director of the Museum, Dr Binita Kane, a consultant in respiratory medicine at Manchester University Foundation NHS Trust who is also an honorary senior lecturer and great supporter of the project, and Shalni Arora, a prominent alumna, all spoke about what the project means to them. The event was attended by the Directors of the British Museum, the Heritage Lottery Fund (which has already provided support to the Museum) and the UK South Asia society, along with Manchester councillors, several of our staff and a number of prominent members of the British Asian communities in Manchester and London.
It has been yet another week of uncertainty over Brexit. Much has happened but what this all means in practice is still relatively unknown. The Prime Minister’s proposed Brexit deal was rejected once again. MPs also voted to reject a no deal Brexit under any circumstances, (though this is not legally binding) and against a second referendum but voted in favour of delaying Brexit-subject of course to the approval of all EU member states. I know how worrying this is for our staff and students and I will certainly update you on any further news or insights that I receive. Information for staff and students including links to the most up to date advice from government sites is available on StaffNet.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his statement this week said that staff at PhD level and above will be excluded from the visa cap which is welcome. He also said that the Augar review of funding of post-18 education would report ‘soon’, though this may not be imminent and an announcement may not happen until late April or May. He stated ‘our universities are powerhouses of discovery and innovation’, which is also good news.
I know that pensions are extremely important to our colleagues. We continue to work with other sector stakeholders to secure an affordable and sustainable Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) for employers and employees. We have just submitted our response to Universities UK’s consultation on the 2018 USS actuarial valuation and the provision of contingent support. USS has issued an invitation to all members to join a webinar on 22 March to provide an update on its current funding position and contribution rates. I would encourage members to join this webinar to help in understanding more about their pension and ask questions of USS. We will publish our response to UUKs consultation on StaffNet next week ahead of the webinar.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor