CoSector Update

This message is primarily for those in CoSector, but do read on in any case.

We (UCU and Unison) met with Sally Townsend, Chris Cobb, Kim Frost and Matt Thorne recently to discuss the future of CoSector. This is part of our relationship with the University of being recognised unions.

The meeting was good natured and was a significant improvement on the style of previous meetings held under strained circumstances.

Things we learned:

1     - All CoSector staff are meeting with management today to receive the same information as we received yesterday. Of course, you might not have been able to attend.

2     - There is an informal recruitment freeze. This does not mean new staff can’t be appointed, especially if a member of staff chooses to leave, but creating new posts will be considerably harder in the short term and will need a formal business case in order to prevent creating roles which are not needed under the business plan.

3     - The Cosmos project is being shut down. We were told there will be no redundancies.

4     - The business plan is being formulated. The board of trustees will be expecting an update in January 2016 and a full version by March 2016.

5     - Any change of terms and conditions was not proposed by the University at this stage, and we welcomed this. The senior management are on “CoSector Terms and Conditions”. We noted that we had never seen nor been consulted on these terms and conditions. The University has said it may choose to extend these T+Cs to new appointments but not any time soon.

We were given assurance that all staff have and continue to be given the opportunity to feed back into the Business case formulation and on a practical level staff are being encouraged to come up with new areas of business or ways of improving current business.

Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns by writing to unison@london.ac.uk