Dear colleagues,

As we head towards the summer break, and enjoy the warmer days across our wonderful campus, we continue to face and plan for the significant challenges experienced by the UK higher education sector.

As Director of Faculty Finance, I wanted to share how our 2025/26 budget and Five-year planning has been developed to consider these challenges, supporting and creating a robust strategy for the Faculty and University to be best prepared for this uncertainty.

We operate in a complex environment as rising costs and real-time reductions in income streams have left UK universities under severe financial pressure, and institutions have been responding by finding ways to reduce costs to navigate these problems.

As a Faculty and University, we have a strong financial position, but we are not immune to the challenges of the market. We face many financial headwinds such as additional National Insurance contributions which increase our University costs by approximately £10m per year. And while our University income grew by 1.5% between 2022/23 and 2023/24, our total expenditure grew by 6.9% over the same period.

To ensure we have sufficient funds available to support our exciting Manchester 2035 strategy we have taken a new approach to our budgeting and planning process this last year, supported by a consistent process and principles across the University:

• We are all in this together: creating a more transparent approach and shared ownership across the University. For our Faculty this meant with a full-day budget meeting with the Faculty Leadership Team (FLT) where each School and the Faculty Office were discussed together, supporting collaboration.
• Generating more cash to provide more choice: embedding opportunities and working out solutions together as part of the process.
• Strategic alignment: focusing on controlling our cost base and identifying new revenue streams to invest in teaching and research.
• Simplifying and increasing funds to deliver the Manchester 2035 strategy: reviewing our Faculty strategic investment to support University investment and opportunities.

The planning process spans a long period of time, starting last September with the first conversations and reviews on strategic numbers planning, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the teams involved in the process across our Schools, Faculty Office and Finance.

The process this year has been challenging given the financial and market complexities we are facing, but with fantastic collaboration and problem-solving across the Faculty we have built on our strong foundation of financial sustainability and growth.

Supporting these foundations, our Faculty Five-year plan includes a continued commitment to delivering an 8% growth in research income and interdisciplinary areas such as AI, along with new commitments to support online growth, aligning to Manchester 2035.

We have had to make several difficult choices and review our other operating expenditure (OOE) to support a cost-conscious environment and our future financial sustainability, but have taken decisions that ensure the least impact on our students and colleagues.

We presented our 2025/26 budget and Five-year-plan to the University Executive in early April. Aligned to our planning principles, this was a new meeting to complete a full University review of each Faculty and professional services, supporting a ‘One University’ approach. The meeting was a very engaging, supportive discussion of the Faculty plan.

Following this, our budget and Five-year plan has received full University Executive approval and is in the final stages of governance over the next few weeks. The Finance team will be sharing your final budget packs after final University approval.

As we move towards the summer period, the Finance team is moving forward with the Future Foundations programme. Supporting Manchester 2035, Future Foundations will deliver standard, simple People and Finance processes, fostering a connected, responsive and data-informed environment with transparent transactions, all underpinned by the Oracle Fusion Cloud platform.

This is an exciting programme that will reduce complexity across our processes, supporting more informed decisions. The focus will be on building local networks, with clear communication to help colleagues prepare for the changes, and I look forward to sharing more information with you on this in the coming months.

Reflecting as we head towards the summer break, I am very proud of the brilliant work the team has completed on the budget and Five-year-plan. I am very much looking forward to attending graduations in a few weeks’ time, my summer holiday and getting ready for another exciting year with the Faculty. I hope everyone has a lovely summer break when it arrives.

Best wishes,

Vicky