The night before the ground-breaking 2018 USS strike, as we packed our hired Leeds Strikemobile full of picketing materials for 14 days of action, I was told Leeds would be hosting all the major news crews and would I please do the (Today programme) first thing… Through snowstorms, hail and wind, we stood firm and we saved our defined benefit scheme. Our members’ determination to see it through and keep fighting for our pensions over the years since has been nothing short of incredible. I’ve had the privilege of leading the USS negotiating team while Vice President in 2019/20. This means I know just how hard our negotiators work and just how much difference industrial action and steely resolve of UCU members has made in those negotiations. On (Monday) we celebrated the signing of deeds marking the restoration of our pensions, lowered contributions, and an additional index-linked sum for each year of retirement to make up for earlier cuts to our benefits. It’s been a long road, a lot of teamwork, and we must both take some time to celebrate and remind ourselves to stay vigilant.

USS remains an ongoing brief for our elected negotiators, higher education committee, and branches at USS institutions. Recently, all candidates in the general secretary election received two sets of questions regarding the USS pension scheme: one set from (Divest USS) and another from two current USS negotiators, (Mark Taylor-Batty) and Jackie Grant. All Divest USS answers are (here), and I understand that Mark and Jackie are soon to publish a blog (I will add that link here once it is live).

I have therefore reproduced my full answers to both sets of questions in this post.

Questions from Mark Taylor-Batty and Jackie Grant

Q1) As you know, from the beginning of negotiations in 2022, UCU negotiators sought full restoration of benefits and compensation for the lost benefits between 2022-2024. We’ve heard claims recently about how our success in that dispute has been due to the change in the financial status of the pension scheme. What part of the success do you put down to the work of UCU negotiators, and what part down to industrial action, and what part the shift from notional deficit to notional surplus in the scheme?

I believe it would be a mistake to de-emphasise the importance of any of these three interwoven factors. The shift to notional surplus is evidence of what we (UCU) have consistently argued: that there were serious problems with the valuation methodology and therefore serious problems with the valuation, which created bogus justifications of the damaging proposals for changes to the USS scheme that we have fought. We have been making the case about inappropriate valuation methodology and its ramifications for a very long time, along with raising concerns about the overall governance of USS. 

The longevity of the fight for USS, predating 2022 by some way, is worth noting. UCU members have repeatedly voted for and taken serious industrial action to defend pensions. Together we have challenged our employers and highlighted areas of real concern with respect to USS governance. Every aspect of our success in USS has been hard-won by members organising together to take action and by successive teams of elected negotiators and advisors putting in many hours of technical work, both into the detail of the specific industrial disputes declared each year and the wider areas for negotiation and decision within the remit of the formal JNC. This teamwork facilitated our push for the establishment of fora and working groups over the past several years that have helped us to shift the ground on USS.

Without this, our employers could very easily have taken the opportunity to further reduce contribution rates without restoring benefits. This would have benefitted employers more than members of the scheme – i.e. it would have meant cheaper employer pension costs and a much reduced pension for our members. Members’ sustained commitment created the space to find the negotiated settlement we needed. I have seen this for myself in leading industrial action in my branch, and in leading USS negotiations as VP HE (2019/20). I am also certain that the excellent work of negotiators and our ability to widely publicise and explain the problems at the heart of this dispute in clear language has helped members to maintain their resolve through deepening their understanding. 

Q2) The joint statements between UCU and UUK in the early part of 2023, which built on the earlier co-ordinated local joint statements, outlined the path and the ultimate restoration and recovery of benefits. A pause in industrial action, following an overwhelming vote to ‘note’ that progress, was instrumental in allowing negotiators the space to action the detail of those completed agreements. Do you still stand by your public recommendations at the time to either ‘note’ or ‘reject’ the progress in that ballot, and/or do you think anything else could have been sought and achieved with continued industrial action on USS?

Yes. It was clear to me at this juncture that we had made more significant progress in the USS dispute than had been secured in the pay and conditions (4 Fights) dispute, and that we would need to consult with the membership on progress in USS. I co-produced a motion to HEC which secured an appropriately constituted approach to consultation in which only the constituents of the relevant bargaining groups were asked to vote on how each of those legally distinct disputes should proceed in Spring 2023. I argued very strongly for the HEC to formally recommend that members in the USS dispute vote “note” – to reflect that: 

1) While at this point we had not yet “won” the dispute, we did have credible evidence that we’d reached a point where further industrial action at that time would not have extracted further movement or benefit – underpinned by joint statements between UCU and UUK.

2) Because we had not yet won – indeed I believe the papers are being signed this week – we did not yet have the degree of assurance that would have been required to formally call off the dispute.

In other words, “voting to note” the progress made and to pause active industrial action in relation to USS was the right thing to do at that time, though I can understand why some members were wary, in light of previous setbacks and examples of poor faith from UUK. By extension, we will need to be ready in future to move to a dispute setting if needed, and stay vigilant because there is no room for complacency over pensions.

Q3) What pragmatic, realistic and achievable objectives for the USS scheme would you propose as the key issues now, as we now pursue the goal of stability in the scheme in dialogue with employers? And what are potential paths to achieving these objectives?

To best equip our elected team of negotiators to secure further progress, we need to further develop policy in some key areas through our democratic structures. Negotiators need to be properly informed about members’ priorities. For example, if there were to be successive surpluses, negotiators need to know what parameters members expect them to work within via the USS JNCs and the array of associated meetings. For that example we need to democratically determine what would be members’ preferred improvements to benefits – would it be improved accrual, better inflation protection, removal of the threshold? 

We need to prioritise establishing stability in the scheme. We will need to be vigilant in the run up to the 2026 valuation, and hold employers to the principle of retaining a good defined benefit scheme for members, rather than rushing to cut benefits and prioritise costs over our retirement. Volatility caused by big swings between deficits and surplus is clearly at odds with the long term nature of the scheme and its investments. We  need to be crystal clear that stability in the scheme must be reproduced in members’ experiences of retiring with dignity on a good pension. 

So we need to prioritise the removal of as much volatility as possible from the valuation process, to break the pattern of problematic valuations feeding a cycle of cuts and disputes. This is something else we (UCU) have been saying for many years, and we have a window of better opportunity to push for this right now. While it is the regulator’s role to seek to protect members of employer DB schemes from drastic collapses, we do need to make sure that the unique nature of USS can be, and is always taken into account. Politically and industrially, we need to be ready – we need to push for space within the Pension Regulator’s proposed (delayed) regulation, for schemes open to new members as USS is – i.e. we need to push back hard against any premise or assumption that all DB schemes are alike and headed for closure. We need recognition that USS is a very large and unusual scheme because it is open, has not yet matured, and income currently exceeds outgoings.

We are also at a key moment for divestment with respect to fossil fuels and arms companies, on which UCU has plenty of strong union policy. We need to impress upon USS and upon our employers that climate change poses direct risks to the scheme’s assets. There is a strong case to be made that failing to divest will be a failure to meet the fiduciary duty that USS claims is holding it back from moving more quickly on ethical investment. A scheme as large as USS should be leading the way. As a union we need to combine political, industrial, and social strategies – I have written more about this in response to DivestUSS but please let me know if it would be useful to see that response as well. 

Q4) What have we learned from the USS dispute and its outcome that might be of value for future disputes?

We’ve been engaged in a series of disputes with Universities UK over USS, which we tend to think of collectively as “the USS dispute”, so my answer here references a fuller history than 2022-24. The formal grounds may have differed in terms of technicalities each time but have arisen from the same underlying issues with methodology and governance.

Since 2018, we have demonstrated to the wider movement as well as to our employers and to ourselves, that industrial action can indeed work, and can drive very serious negotiations for positive changes we were asked to believe impossible. In many ways it would have been very “easy” (and very damaging) to accept the employers’ narrative. A valuable lesson is that we won because didn’t give up: we knew we were right and we stuck together. Given the complexities and technicalities at play in this dispute, it is also a testament to what can be learned and translated into organising in a relatively short time by a large group of motivated members. 

We need to look really closely at some of the effective infrastructure we have used and developed to help ourselves, as a wider membership, to understand very technical information and analyses – which has helped to keep us going in the face of intransigence. USS disputes have also been instrumental in the development of very effective Get The Vote Out (GTVO) strategies in UCU, and in illustrating the additional leverage we can gain in our disputes through activity that is complementary to (but not a replacement for) industrial action: we can augment our leverage through political campaigning and getting our side of the story out there to challenge dominant narratives of “no alternative”.  

I think we should recognise the power of deliberative spaces such as the UCU pensions mailing list in this, where incredibly detailed discussions regularly take place out of the public glare of social media. The very fact that the discussions on this list facilitate complex debate that can change the minds of participants and readers speaks to this. I believe this also underlines that the sudden deactivation of the larger UCU Activist List last year was a serious error. I am committed to updating and reinstating this, alongside an exploration of further platforms, mechanisms and facilitation approaches that can bring activists across the union together to share experiences, mutual learning, and peer support. I have made proposals in my manifesto designed to further support more coordinated approaches to organising (e.g. via organising hubs) and to create more space for synchronous and asynchronous dialogue between members.

A further very fundamental lesson is: that it really is possible for us to work across divisions of opinion and analyses in UCU. Despite some unfortunate public fractures in more recent years, the elected basis of the USS negotiating team and its advisors has always meant it has been cross-factional, and is therefore a good example of how powerful it is when we work together across divisions in the interests of members for a shared goal. In this case, UCU members’ tenacity and willingness to act together has made a significant improvement to the current pay packet and future retirement package of many university staff. 

Questions from Divest USS

1) Do you agree that there is an urgent need for USS to divest from fossil fuels? 

Yes, USS urgently needs to divest. I’ve always voted to strengthen our union policy in this area. I chaired our USS negotiation team and wider Superannuation Working Group as UCU Vice President in 2019/20. During this time we shifted the ground by agreeing on the need for spaces for UCU and UUK negotiators to examine and propose routes to more ethical investment in dialogue with USS. This led to the agreement in 2020 for biannual meetings between negotiators, the USS Head of Investment, and the USS responsible investment team. UCU negotiators had pressed this for some time: there are no jobs on a burning planet, and retiring on one is not the kind of ‘security’ in later life anyone wants. 

USS is an enormous scheme and therefore where it invests makes a difference. USS have tended to move slowly, proclaiming the importance of their fiduciary duty to the scheme when questioned on progress and pace. UCU’s job is to impress upon USS – and our employers –  that climate change poses direct risks to health and life. To put it in the most basic of terms: climate change also poses direct risks to the scheme’s assets, meaning failure to divest will be a failure to meet that fiduciary duty. Research does show most pension funds and insurers are planning increases to the proportion of investments made in renewable energy infrastructure in the coming years, but a scheme as large as USS should be leading the way.

As GS I will back this message and I will ensure our negotiators have full and timely support and analyses they need to make the case to USS, and to our employers’ negotiation team, whose many statements issued on the climate emergency across the sector need to be followed up with meaningful action. I’ve been working very hard with my fellow co-chair and members of the UCU Climate and Ecological Emergency Committee to establish how we, and the wider expertise and reach of UCU’s green reps network can best support elected UCU negotiators in this space. As GS I will ensure that all negotiators are supported in this way and can easily access expertise and understand members’ experiences across our membership.

2) What actions would you take to make this happen if elected to General Secretary?

We need to identify and build our leverage with respect to divestment quickly and carefully, to make an impact that will shift the USS’s investment ethos. This means pushing on all possible levers politically, socially, and through our industrial relationships. As USS do not employ our members, we cannot therefore take industrial action to target USS. However, we can apply pressure in other ways. For example, we can and must lobby employers, both individually and through their representative body, and write to individual Trustees, asking them to join with us in pushing USS to promote transition to a green economy and to divest from fossil fuels rapidly. Many employers have made positive or promising statements on the climate crisis in recent years but we have seen relatively little progress in action. 

Members in the USS pension will all have a defined benefit (DB) pension (the “Retired Income Builder”) and if they earn above the threshold (currently £41,004) pension contributions associated with those earnings will be in the defined contribution (DC) scheme, known as the “Investment Builder”. Members have some choice in where their part of the DC pension pot is invested, but not enough, and many are not aware of the power they can exercise in the choices they do have. There are many ethical funds in the private pensions market but USS draws a distinction between DC funds, and the duty placed on defined benefit (DB) schemes to perform well. UCU needs to argue strongly for USS to look to schemes making better choices, and note that ethical options do exist which perform in a manner that would satisfy fiduciary duty – ethics and fiduciary duty need not be mutually exclusive. We will send a louder message if our employers’ representatives back us on this call for ethical and secure pensions.

One of my key priorities as GS is to fully embed climate demands into our bargaining agenda, and this includes pushing for divestment. I plan to introduce organising hubs to complement the work of regional committees and regional offices, which will facilitate greater networking across branches and therefore more coherent coordination of campaigning. With the backing of better data and analyses via my proposal for an expanded UCU Research Unit, we will be better placed to lodge further green new deal claims with employers at the local level which will support and drive our demands for a Just Transition at sectoral and national levels. This pressure could be instrumental in shifting the dial for employers’ priorities, and push them to more emphatically back our call for USS to do the same.

I believe that by increasing our research capacity as I’ve proposed, we will be well positioned to amplify and further research which shows failing to divest will represent a failure of the Trustee in their fiduciary duty in the medium and longer terms. USS’s response to pressure on ethical investment has frequently been to excuse some investments by emphasising the influence they can wield on a board of shareholders. As this is their reasoning for not pulling investment out of certain problematic companies (e.g. Thames Water) I will ensure our negotiators and wider membership are in the best position to hold them to account, and to push for positive investment in organisations that are taking real action to promote a just transition. 

There are several avenues for us to do this, including but not limited to: 

  • Closely monitoring and publicising how many times USS have actually used their votes on boards to promote transition. Noting that pension schemes such as Border & Coast publish their voting records on this, we must push USS to do the same. 
  • Pushing for more open dialogue about fiduciary duty, including producing comparisons to schemes with stronger ethical investment strategies.
  • Pushing USS to publish more information about portfolios of funds open for members to invest via the defined contribution (DC) part of the scheme where they have some control, highlighting to what degree these organisations prioritise a just transition, and where there is any involvement in conflict or arms production. 
  • I would also ensure UCU highlights members’ existing options within the DC portion of the scheme, if they have money in the DC part, encouraging members to direct this proportion of their pension fund into ethical investment. We need a wider awareness raising campaign on this, so that our members are able to lead by doing and we can more strongly argue USS itself must follow. 

Ultimately, I will do everything I can as GS to keep the pressure on USS and our employers to understand that environmental collapse is the opposite of a “good investment” and this will include helping every member in the USS scheme to understand how they can add their voice to this campaign.