The USS Joint Expert Panel is being set up to fail. Here’s what you can do.
NB: edited to reflect outcome — scroll to end
On 13 April, UCU members voted by a wide margin to suspend industrial action over proposed cuts to their USS pension, to allow for the establishment of a Joint Expert Panel (JEP) to review the scheme’s valuation. Having pushed members so hard to accept this hazy solution, UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt should have pushed equally hard to set up the JEP in a way that favours union members. She has not. UCU now risks being co-opted into endorsing a pensions cut. Immediate action is needed to avert this.
The JEP set-up
The terms of the JEP have been cooked up in private between Hunt and UUK, once again bypassing UCU’s elected pensions negotiators. They were presented to the Higher Education Committee (HEC) on 27 April as a fait accompli. HEC members from UCU Left tried to have the terms amended, but the chair blocked this, showing that the IBL faction which dominates the union remains totally hostile to basic tenets of democracy and accountability.
The JEP’s terms of reference were initially branded “confidential” but leaked to me (see here), and Sally Hunt has now released them. These terms are problematic in four ways:
1. UCU’s representatives are to be appointed, not elected, providing no accountability to members. UCU’s Superannuation Working Group (SWG) will review self-nominated applicants on 16 May and appoint three representatives. The SWG is a formal union body whose members are elected but you will search the UCU website for its details in vain. It comprises: (a) the 5 UCU members of the USS Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) plus 2 alternates; (2) the 3 UCU members of USS Trustee Board; and (3) the 3 members of UCU’s USS Advisory Committee.
2. There will be no feedback mechanism to keep members informed or allow any democratic control over the process. The JEP will report in September, but before that there will be no reporting to any UCU body, let alone the members, providing no opportunity for us to influence its work. It is an ad hoc, unelected body to which responsibility for winning this dispute has been outsourced, yet the membership will have no control over its work whatsoever.
3. The JEP process will be completely non-transparent as its business will be “confidential”. UCU and UUK representatives will be closeted in talks for four months with all discussions, papers, data, etc, kept secret. Ordinary UCU members, whose security in retirement hangs in the balance, will have no way of even knowing what is happening, let alone influencing it. The result will be dumped on members in September with no preparatory action possible.
4. The JEP process seems to be divided into two, with part one committed to merely reviewing the 2017 valuation and only part two, on future valuations, addressing the methods to be used. The wording here (see Appendix C, section 2–3) is vague and imprecise, but there are three bullet points, the first being “make an assessment of the 2017 valuation”, while only the second two address “reviewing the basis of the scheme evaluation” and agreeing “key principles to underpin the future joint approach… to the valuation”. JEP is directed to report on the 2017 valuation in September 2018, and the future valuations sometime in 2018 (section 3). This seems to imply that the 2017 valuation will be reviewed without challenging the methodology. But it is precisely the present methodology that has led to the employer’s conclusion that our pensions must be cut. If that is not challenged until future valuations, the logical implication is that pension cuts are necessary, at least in the medium term, until a new valuation methodology is accepted. In this sense, the JEP clearly risks being used merely to “boost public confidence” in the existing valuation, as the Chief Executive of UUK has put it.
These terms of refererence fly in the face of basic principles of accountability and democracy, and undermine the (already very limited) potential of the JEP to save our pensions. Moreover, we have been here before. In 2015, UCU and UUK agreed to establish a Joint Valuation Working Group with a very similar remit, which achieved absolutely nothing. Yet another unaccountable body, acting in secrecy, will now make determinations on our pensions, which could well be highly detrimental to members. Having committed to this process, UCU would find it very difficult to reject the JEP’s outcomes, and thereby become co-opted into selling a pensions cut to its own members in the autumn.
What you can do
An open letter protesting the proposed terms of reference and demanding that the National Executive Committee change them is now open for signatures. The NEC meets next Friday, 4 May, so this is extremely urgent. Members need to sign the letter and encourage others to do so. They should also alert their branch committees as to what is happening, and ask them to contact NEC members to protest and demand redress. This will allow sympathetic members of the NEC to move an emergency motion.
Members and branches should also lobby the SWG to shortlist (or, if changes are not made, appoint) as UCU’s JEP representatives people who are not merely technical experts in the domain of pensions but who are committed to fight for the beneficiaries of USS (i.e. us). Our representatives need not to be defeatist technocrats who, seeing regulations and standard operating procedures, wring their hands and bemoan that nothing can be done — if they are, we might as well write off the JEP immediately and prepare now to go back on strike. Our representatives need to be people who, like Dennis Leech, understand the assumptions underpinning valuations are chosen politically, not neutrally, and that regulatory guidelines are not graven in stone but are flexible, vague and moveable. In other words, our representatives need to be politically savvy as well as technical experts. The SWG also needs to ensure that our representatives are fully supported by First Actuarial, UCU’s actuaries.
None of this is to put excessive faith in the JEP; it is just about trying to ensure the JEP does all it reasonably can, given the inherent constraints of any depoliticising, technical process, which I have discussed at length elsewhere. I am still concerned that detrimental changes, similar to the rejected deal emerging from ACAS talks on 12 March, will be proposed when the JEP reports in September. In that case, we will need to be ready to fight again, and so preparing the union for action remains an urgent task. Nonetheless, we must fight on every front available to us. Moreover, it is the special responsibility of those who advocated and voted “yes” in the consultative ballot to prove me wrong. They can start by ensuring a JEP that is primed to fight for USS’s beneficiaries.
The outcome — added 8 May 2018
This is based on reports by two NEC members, Sean Wallis (UCL) and Rachel Cohen (City). An emergency motion was tabled by NEC member Carlo Morelli, which took up the substance of our petition. Unfortunately, the chair (UCU President Joana de Groot) sought to block discussion of the motion, on the grounds that the JEP is not a committee of the NEC. Members of UCU Left formally “challenged” the chair (i.e. moved a vote to force the motion to be debated), supported by independent members. However, this was opposed by members of the Independent Broad Left faction. The challenge was defeated 24–18, so the motion was not discussed. Ironically, the chair of the Higher Education Committee, Douglas Chalmers, who had pushed through the JEP plans with no amendments allowed, then tabled a motion condemning the release of the JEP document whilst simultaneously claiming that UCU “prides itself on open debate”. De Groot and Chalmers apparently committed to making some sort of formal response to our petition.
UCU Congress and the HE Sector Conference, which occur at the end of May, now remain the only mechanisms for having any influence over the JEP process. However, the timeframe has been deliberately designed to get the JEP underway before Congress is held, so this will be difficult. Members may well reflect that Congress/ HESC needs to focus on improving UCU’s capacity for “open debate”. I am sure members will also recall who supports “open debate” when the time for re-electing NEC members comes around.
