Queen's University to cut up to 270 jobs

Queen's University Belfast (QUB) is acceptable to chopped up to 270 jobs - much than 5% of its workforce.

According to documents seen by BBC News NI, the assemblage is facing a shortage of much than £11m successful 2024-25.

It is readying to chopped the jobs done a voluntary redundancy scheme.

In a statement, a assemblage spokesperson said: "There volition beryllium nary compulsory redundancies.”

"We are successful the aboriginal stages of processing a projected voluntary severance strategy and are awaiting a effect from the commercialized unions to our invitation to discuss," they said.

"Due to ineligible considerations, we are incapable to disclose further details astatine this time."

QUB presently employs astir 4,800 unit successful scope of academic, probe and enactment roles.

In documents seen by BBC News NI, the assemblage said that the unit redundancy plans did not mean that grade courses would beryllium chopped oregon closed.

But unions person claimed the assemblage failed to consult them decently implicit the redundancy plans oregon supply elaborate reasons for them.

Both the University and College Union (UCU) and Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance (Nipsa) person raised concerns astir the process.

The UCU's Northern Ireland official, Katharine Clarke, said that the assemblage absorption had truthful acold "shown nary tendency to debar dismissals".

"All they privation to speech to the unions astir is opening a voluntary severance scheme," she said.

"The UCU received notification from Queen’s implicit a period agone that it is seeking to effect 270 redundancies but since that clip the national has not been supplied with the accusation required by instrumentality to prosecute successful statutory consultation.

"When an leader proposes to marque 20 oregon much workers redundant, authorities compels the leader to supply some the fig and descriptions of the workers it proposes to dismiss.

"The leader indispensable show posts are nary longer required oregon that determination is simply a reduced request for a peculiar benignant of work."

"Queen’s person failed to proviso this information."

Bernard Trainor from Nipsa said that the national was "deeply acrophobic astir the projected implementation of a Voluntary Severance Scheme astatine Queen's".

"Despite a reappraisal of the university's nationalist accounts, determination is nary wide grounds to enactment the request for specified a measurement astatine this time, raising superior questions astir its rationale," helium continued.

Mr Trainor said the national is disquieted astir the interaction the strategy volition person connected remaining staff.

"A simplification successful the workforce of up to 270 unit volition inevitably pb to accrued workloads for those near behind, putting undue unit connected unit and perchance compromising the prime of acquisition and services delivered by the university."

He said the national believes "full and meaningful consultation" should instrumentality spot earlier the strategy is implemented.

In 2017, a tribunal ruled that Ulster University (UU) was guilty of “serious nonaccomplishment to consult” with the UCU implicit redundancies and told it to wage a full of implicit £1m to 143 erstwhile members of staff.