Unions ask for RPI plus three per cent

The five campus unions are asking for an increase on all paypoints of RPI plus 3 per cent, or £3,000 if this is more, to be paid in full in August 2026. This is the opening position in the 2026-27 round of New Jnches pay negotiations.

At the lower end of the pay spine, the ask is for the minimum hourly rate of pay to rise to £15hr. Despite being told last year that this was an issue for individual employers and not the New JNCHES negotiation, unions also want all member institutions to become Foundation Living Wage employers – though £15hr is significantly higher than the current foundation living wage.

There’s a keenness for the long awaited joint working groups on contract types, workload, equality pay gaps, and the review of the pay spine (priorities that have featured in pay claims for at least the past five years) – but unions add the caveat that this work should proceed irrespective of any position they decide to take on the UCEA pay offer. In the past employer participation has been curtailed at the point that unions vote to take industrial action.

The other key request is for UCEA to work with unions on lobbying the government for higher education funding reform, a recognition that pay restraint may not entirely be based on the decisions of employers. There’s an interesting request on career pathways for professional services staff, work that employers have also taken an interest in given recruitment and retention issues with professional staff.

And the hope is expressed that redundancies can be avoided through the adoption of “redundancy avoidance” policies along the lines of a version the unions have drafted. This mandates an institutional committee on redundancy avoidance, which would communicate directly with the trade union representatives and manage redeployment, retraining, and careers advice offers for affected staff.

With the state of sector finances being what it is, the central pay component is a challenging ask. The unions note that:

University employers are increasingly failing to implement the pay award in full despite being signed up to New JNCHES, leaving some staff to face several months of delays in receiving their pay award and without this being backdated. We are clear that all university employers must pay the award in full in August 2026.

and it is not clear, given that many struggled to pay last year’s 1.4 per cent increase from August 2025, how employers are expected to achieve this without putting finances (and thus employment) at risk.

UCEA’s chief executive, Raj Jethwa said:

At a time when HE institutions are struggling with challenges on several fronts, including economic uncertainty and changes in government policy, the sector will see this claim as extremely challenging.

And on the issue of progress on workload, equality pay gap, or contract types it seems likely that what UCEA describes as “decisions that meant that they could not participate in this work” will again preclude valuable work if industrial action is on the cards.

The recent UCU ballot on industrial action failed to show evidence of widespread appetite for action on pay at a moment when local disputes over redundancies and restructuring are everywhere. UCU general secretary Jo Grady said:

As the employer body, UCEA now needs to work with us to stabilise the sector through protecting jobs and raising pay. A failure to do so risks driving the sector to a point of no return

This suggests that of all the asks on the union side, the need for UCEA and the unions to work together on lobbying for a better financial settlement is the most important, and the whole sector will be hoping that this line can hold even in the likely case that the headline pay claim proves unaffordable.