President's weekly update
3 June 2021
We announced the commercial partner for Innovation District Manchester (ID Manchester) in north Manchester, the development of our North campus. You can watch the announcement held in the Great Hall in our Sackville Street building. This is a major milestone in our innovation strategy which is a key part of our strategic plan which has been a number of years in the planning. We believe that the £1.5bn development will be the largest of its kind in Europe. The University will retain the freehold of the land but will work in partnership with the commercial partner, which will fund the development. It is planned to create thousands of jobs and huge opportunities for the University to work with companies small and large.
At the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership we heard about a new development
Although we have had a ‘meeting light’ week a number of key meetings have continued. This week we held a briefing for Senate on the work of the Foresight Group, led by Professor Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Luke and Matt Atkin, Director of Planning, also discussed our work on
At the main Senate meeting, in addition to regular updates, we discussed the recording of lectures, updating of our intellectual property policy, actions taken under the Office for Students statement of expectations on tackling harassment and sexual misconduct, and motions from School Boards. Senate also made recommendations to the Board for the award of honorary
The meeting was again attended by staff from Halpin, which is conducting an independent review of our governance and Senate was updated on progress with the review which will conclude in July.
At a meeting with a small group of staff from across the University we discussed finances for the higher education sector, balancing workload and student numbers. We spent much of the time considering what we all felt was an expansion of meetings, particularly now it seems easier to organise by Zoom or Teams, and how we can reduce the number and duration of meetings, the length of papers (something that we are trying to do for our Board) and some processes which seem unduly cumbersome. Before COVID, this was something that we asked all staff to consider - what could we stop doing, do less of, or do more efficiently? It’s time to all think about this again as we start to return to what we hope will be more normal work patterns.
We held an extended meeting to consider budgets for next year which include a significant increase in costs in part due to the rise in the cost of the USS pension scheme by about £12m a year which is due to come in in October 2021. I have again been involved in a number of meetings to consider how we prevent further very significant increases in contributions for employers and members of the scheme. We will
I attended the Manchester China Forum where we heard about investments in Greater Manchester by China and the possibility for flights resuming shortly. The latter will be very important to us in the autumn when international students arrive.
I spoke to the incoming head of our Hong Kong Foundation, Patrick Vizzone,
Although my term on the Council for Science and Technology (CST) has ended, I am still helping with their work on how research and innovation can help in ‘levelling up’. This has been developed jointly with the Industrial Strategy Council so the meeting was attended by Andy Haldane, who now has an honorary chair in our business school, and Lord John Browne, the new co-chair of CST.
I met Vikas Shah, who is an alumnus, on the Alliance Manchester Business School advisory board and holds an honorary chair. Vikas has just joined the board of the Department on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and is a great supporter of the University and of small start-up businesses.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor