I left the students’ union movement a couple of years ago after spending two decades working in and around unions.
Now working in higher education with a national organisation close to university governance and leadership, I’ve been keen to understand how intensifying financial pressure on universities and the changing shape of UK HE more broadly is affecting students’ unions, their governance, and their leadership.
To explore this, I reviewed publicly available accounts on the Charity Commission website.
I wouldn’t pretend this is a precise science – financial accounts rarely tell the full story about context, board judgment, or strategic intent. But they do allow for some basic trend analysis using a consistent, transparent data source.
I conducted this exercise slightly before the annual reporting deadline, meaning the most recent year isn’t yet available for all unions.
I therefore focused only on English students’ unions that had submitted accounts for both the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years. That produced a sample of 37 unions – smaller than it will soon be as returns are completed, but enough to reveal some worrying patterns.
Deficits on the rise, income falling away
A deficit isn’t inherently a bad thing – it can be planned, strategic, or linked to capital investment or organisational change. Recurring or growing deficits are another matter, eroding reserves and increasing financial vulnerability over time.
In this sample, 11 of the 37 unions reported a deficit in 2023/24. That number rose to 16 in 2024/25. More concerningly, the combined deficit of those institutions operating at a deficit more than doubled from -£670,429 in 2023/24 to -£1,515,858 in 2024/25.
Deficits were also unevenly distributed. Six students’ unions posted deficits in both financial years, with a combined shortfall of nearly £1 million across the two-year period (-£936,253). For a small number of organisations, that represents a significant and rapid weakening of financial resilience.
Deficits alone don’t tell the full story, so I also looked at income trends. In an environment of rising costs and overheads, it’s reasonable to expect charities to need at least stable, if not growing, income to maintain services.
Historically, most unions experienced sustained income growth, although I suspect many also became increasingly dependent on university grant funding as commercial income sources became harder to sustain. That picture now appears to be changing.
Nineteen of the 37 unions reported lower total income in 2024/25 than in 2023/24. At a time when operating costs are rising and student demand for support is increasing, that should be a cause for concern. Across those 19 unions, the combined income drop amounted to a £15.5 million decline in a single year.
Some unions successfully mitigated this by reducing expenditure or cutting activity, but that inevitably carries organisational and charitable consequence, and it isn’t a strategy that can be repeated indefinitely if income continues to fall year on year.
The HE backdrop
These trends can’t be separated from the wider financial position of universities. The move to £9,000 fees brought a prolonged period of growth for both universities and students’ unions, aided by low inflation and expanding international recruitment. Unions benefited through higher institutional grants and investment in buildings and facilities that supported commercial income.
That era has long since passed. Tuition fees have been effectively frozen for over a decade, international recruitment has become politically contested, Brexit removed EU students, and inflation has surged. OfS reported in May 2025 that English HE providers were experiencing a third consecutive annual decline in sector finances, alongside sustained falls in liquidity and a 37 per cent drop in aggregated surplus.
As university surpluses decline, so too does their ability to invest in students’ unions. Institutional responses – cuts to departmental budgets, restructuring programmes, delayed capital investment, and increasing student-to-staff ratios – have started to reach SU grant funding. This is happening at exactly the moment unions are facing increased demand from students experiencing financial and personal hardship, reduced commercial income, and growing complexity in the advocacy agenda.
Looking back, I’m acutely aware that much of my own SU career took place during comparatively benign financial conditions. Governing and managing when times are good is one thing – doing so amid contracting income, rising costs, and existential questions about operating models is far harder.
That context places an extraordinary responsibility on SU trustee boards. With pressure likely to be sustained, incremental change won’t be enough – short-term deficits, minor restructures, or marginal trading improvements won’t address the underlying strategic challenge. What’s needed is deeper, more ambitious governance-led thinking.
Five questions for boards
1. Institutional change and business continuity
Universities are increasingly pursuing mergers, partnerships, and structural change. For unions – often with limited control and little notice – the legal and operating environment of their primary funder may change rapidly. How sound are your scenario plans for that possibility? Elected officers who sit on university governing bodies may have access to sensitive information about changes being considered, and we need to ask whether they’re properly supported to manage that dual responsibility.
2. Shared services and collaboration
As funding declines, how many unions are seriously exploring shared services? Establishing a legal vehicle with trusted partners, starting with low-risk functions and scaling up, may offer one of the few viable ways to reduce costs while preserving capacity.
3. Strategy under financial constraint
Economic decline creates new strategic tensions. Commitments to the real living wage, expanding student hardship support, or long-standing subsidy assumptions may no longer align. Does your strategy include clear financial metrics – such as the proportion of turnover available for central services – and defined responses if income drops sharply?
4. Resetting the institutional relationship
Universities should be sympathetic to SU pressures, albeit their own challenges are deeper, more complex, and more regulated. How does the partnership need to evolve? There may be value in more structured, reciprocal financial intelligence-sharing between SU and university governing bodies – handled carefully but proactively – to strengthen collective resilience and find opportunities to share the burden or benefit of change initiatives.
5. Reserves and risk appetite
Many unions historically relied on the perceived stability of university funding to justify lower reserves. That assumption feels much shakier now.
Rising student need, declining commercial income, and increasing costs demand a fresh look at reserves policy and risk appetite – not just on paper, but embedded into strategy, decision-making, and culture.
I recognise the privilege of writing this from outside the day-to-day reality of running or governing an SU.
But I’m also concerned that without serious reflection and leadership at board level, some unions risk sleepwalking into long-term decline – and the challenges that have built up here aren’t going to resolve quickly or easily, even in more stable times than these.
The pressures are structural, sustained, and unlikely to resolve quickly.
Responding to them will demand courage, collaboration, and a willingness to ask – and act on – some very hard questions.
Students’ unions are wonderful assets that enrich university life and wider society, and they’re worth protecting, preserving, and reinventing.
Timely article (and well written as always) Ben as Boards consider budgets and planning for next year. Certainly Boards across HE SUs will be having increasingly challenging conversations this summer.