When the Personnel Committee started work in October 2000, under the new governance arrangements, its members were keenly aware of a number of related, unresolved issues concerning academic staff and their reward and remuneration on which much valuable work has been done. In spite of the context of financial constraint and national uncertainty post-Bett, we thought that we should make as much progress towards equitable policies as possible, within broad central frameworks. These would have to address the issues facing both the divisions and colleges.
It would be wonderful if we could give more money to more people in more parts of the University, but we do not have it. When more money becomes available, following the HEFCE allocation announced two months ago, there will be further discussion. We do not know definitively how much money there will be for Oxford, or for academic as opposed to support staff, or what conditions will be attached to it.
This debate is about the circumstances in which we are now.
It should be noted that there were diverse responses to the consultative process last summer on a merit award scheme. These were analysed and have informed these proposals—we did listen.
A large majority of faculty boards supported the principle of extending the system of merit payments. A smaller majority of those colleges that responded did, and individual responses were equally divided. There was more disagreement about the details and the financial provision. Council could not commit successor bodies, and ultimately there was no money.
Burdens of academic staff must be addressed. This is probably the important issue to many. So we should build on the excellent work and consultation of the Joint Working Group on Joint Appointments. Divisions, through departments and faculties, are considering teaching and other responsibilities appropriate in each subject, as syllabuses are reviewed, and based on the centrality of tutorials. There is a mechanism now in place for discussion with colleges, to streamline and reduce burdens within a broad framework. May I make a personal plea at this point—that we are sensitive to how describing academic work, including teaching and examining, as a burden, may sound to the outsider. We should restrict this description to administrative burdens, which should certainly be reduced. It is clear that detailed arrangements, suitable for each subject, cannot be decided upon or imposed centrally. The Personnel Committee will monitor changes at the centre through its Joint Appointments Panel, with equal representation of colleges and of the University.
Turning to academic salaries, the capacity to retain and recruit outstanding academics must be addressed, with the requirement to preserve collegiality and collaboration. So how do we proceed? There are particular localised and infrequent but acute problems of recruitment and retention. Urgent action is necessary to safeguard Oxford's academic position.
(1) Flexibility within age-related scale. An individual's salary can be raised to any point within the university age-related scale in pressing cases. This involves robust criteria and procedures. It will enable recruitment of staff that otherwise would not have come to this University, particularly young lecturers with young families.
(2) We should reinstate the periodic gathered-field exercise giving new or enhanced distinction awards to statutory and ad hominem professors in the face of increased competition both nationally and internationally. Attracting such leaders in their field enables the retention and recruitment of other outstanding staff in turn.
(3) This should be extended to readers.
(4) Separate funding for awards to incoming professors should be maintained, and it is important to safeguard the funding stream for this.
(5) The recognition of distinction attracted virtually unanimous support for its reinstatement. This was surprising, given the view of the former central bodies.
(6) ULNTFs. An ad hoc working group of the Planning and Resource Allocation Committee and colleges, with representatives of the Personnel Committee, has made good progress. A scheme is being developed to address differences in responsibilities through appropriate remuneration.
(7) A mechanism should be available to enable the making of additional payments to lecturers, based on an exceptional academic case. This would only be for those individuals where the case demonstrating the overwhelming importance of recruiting, retaining, and rewarding key and distinguished staff can be made.
Consultation on the merit award scheme proposed in 2000 showed that a majority believed it wrong that this can never happen for lecturers who currently have no access to discretionary salary arrangements. It should be noted that this is available for academic-related staff, through super-scale points and the possibility of upgrading. It would introduce a potential for flexibility, which other universities have with regard to professorial appointments to which they try to recruit from Oxford, without new bureaucracy and time-consuming processes involving gathered fields.
The decision would involve the division, with the college, considering the academic consequences of a potential resignation or failure to recruit an exceptional individual. In the latter example, consideration would be in the context of the college's and University's jointly agreed selection criteria for the post.
There must be safeguards: the lack of money, the robust case of an overwhelming need to attract or retain in exceptional instances, in consultation with the Head of House, with no expectation or question of a college paying 'extra', and the Personnel Committee continuing to discuss the detailed arrangements.
As I doubt that there is anyone here who does not support this University continuing in the 'First Division', I trust that you will support promulgation of this statute.
At present, merit awards are available, in carefully controlled circumstances, to statutory and ad hominem professors. The circumstances are carefully controlled for reasons of equity, but the scheme works well, and has helped to retain within the University some who might otherwise have left; it has served as an encouragement to others who might never consider leaving, but who have seen their work rewarded. Council proposes to extend this scheme to statutory and ad hominem readers, for just the same reasons.
At present, there is a degree of flexibility over the placing of young lecturers on the age–wage scale. In some cases a lecturer's salary is moved up the scale two, three, or even occasionally five points above the level that would be determined by the lecturer's age alone. This has proved invaluable in allowing us to attract and retain outstanding young staff whom otherwise we might lose from Oxford. The power to move someone by two points has existed since 1988; it was extended to five points in 1998; this has not weakened our academic community, nor our sense of academic community, and we have many excellent people amongst us who would otherwise not be here. Council proposes to extend this scheme so that the flexibility becomes complete within the age–wage scale.
That leaves those lecturers who have reached the top of the age–wage scale, and whose salaries are at the joint maximum. The flexibilities I have mentioned so far are of no use to them, yet as the Principal has said, they form an important group of people upon whom much depends. As things stand, there is no way of paying any extra salary to these people, however great their merit and however great the University's need to retain them. What Council proposes here is that it should be possible to make extra payments to those at the top of the age–wage scale, in really exceptional cases.
Given our financial situation, these extra payments cannot be as great as they ought to be, nor can they be given to as many people as ought to receive them. They can nevertheless be given to a significant few, and one may reasonably hope to a steadily increasing number. The fact that we cannot make them as generously as we should like to is not a reason for not making them at all, when they are so badly needed to retain and reward some of our best people. And here it is of crucial importance not to underestimate the difference it would make if we could just remove, as is proposed, the glass ceiling that so many people, presently on the joint maximum, feel prevents them from ever making any financial advance within the University. The proposal does not promise a large advance, but it makes advance possible, and that by itself should make a substantial difference to the way that many people see things.
The flexibility Council proposes is limited, partly because of limited resources, partly for reasons of equity. What resources we have we must use fairly, and the system proposed is designed to ensure that fairness. Any extra payments will have to be funded by the divisions, and the divisions have many calls on such money as they have. What we do must therefore be carefully controlled, with considerations of equity firmly in mind. But, again as the Principal has said, on the proposals before the House, on the proposals in the explanatory note, it certainly would be firmly controlled. Proposals for such payments would be made by heads of division, but the decision would be made by the Vice-Chancellor on appropriately balanced advice in consultation with colleges where appropriate. The Vice-Chancellor's judgements would be reported to the Personnel Committee. The Vice-Chancellor and the Personnel Committee would have the responsibility of ensuring that these payments were fairly and equitably made. But this is a responsibility they are very well equipped to discharge. Indeed the Personnel Committee is deliberately designed to include a broad variety of interests and opinions for just this kind of reason.
In my own view, there is another reason for caution about introducing too much flexibility. It is for many—and I include myself among them—an attraction of Oxford that our pay scales are not market-driven, but reflect a sense of academic community that many institutions fail to achieve. Others may see things differently, but I at least would not like to see the University allow the forces of the market to dictate its salary structure. The proposals before us today do not take us into that position. We cannot, however, entirely ignore the forces of the market, and today's proposals allow us the flexibility that we absolutely require if we are to retain all that is valuable about our present system, including just that sense of academic community. For we have to recognise that we live in a competitive world, a world in which we have to be able to respond to market pressures without allowing them to dominate us. We need, in other words, a careful compromise between community and competitiveness; and that is what Council is proposing.
Some will complain that we should not adopt these proposals, because they will destroy that sense of community. They are wrong: they will provide the necessary flexibility for the sense of community to flourish, and for Oxford to remain a first-rate international university. Some will complain, as they did to the last set of proposals, that there is not enough money available to make the proposals worth adopting. They too are wrong: even with a little money quite a lot can be done, and the psychological advantage of removing that glass ceiling is crucially important. Some will complain that there simply ought to be more money. They are right. But that is not a matter under the University's control. The University is suffering from chronic underfunding, and we must all hope that this situation does not continue. We must do what we can, and we are doing what we can, to ensure that the situation does not continue. We must, of course, give that high priority to improving academic salaries that Council is proposing. But while the underfunding does continue, if we are to continue to flourish in this dry and stony ground, we need the flexibility that Council proposes.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg to second the motion.
I do not oppose these proposals lightly. It is precisely because I recognise the seriousness of the issues, and appreciate the difficulties that confront the University and Council, that I wish Council to reconsider the proposals which the Personnel Committee has brought forward.
There has been some discussion within the University and its colleges of the 'broad framework' set out by the Personnel Committee and its proposals to take forward the work of the Joint Working Party on Joint Appointments. We can all agree on the need to reduce the excessive demands—'burdens' was their word, not mine—of teaching on some academic staff. We are a long way from accepting either the desirability, or the feasibility, of the working party's or the committee's suggestions as to how this can be done. The explanatory note refers to these matters without spelling out the Personnel Committee's own proposals or telling us whether it no longer wishes to pursue all of its recommendations.
The suggestions that the Personnel Committee put forward to colleges explicitly involved a fundamental redefinition of the contracts of college fellows and university lecturers. They required a shift in responsibility for arranging and providing a substantial part of the undergraduate degree course from colleges to departments or faculties. Money would follow students, with direct implications for the delicate balance of financial allocations between colleges and the University. It is unclear to me what we are being asked to vote for.
The explanatory note rightly recognises the most blatant of the several inequities in the determination of salaries and allowances paid to the academic and academic-related staff of the University and its colleges. This is the determination of the salaries of ULNTFs, whose colleges are unable to make their combined salaries up to the level of the so-called 'joint maximum'. If the University is able to define a 'common contract', with a common measure of teaching commitment, it must arrange for anybody whose commitments are at or near that level to be paid routinely the same in salary as their colleagues holding tutorial or equivalent college fellowships.
The explanatory note puts forward cumbersome proposals for monitoring whether sufficient work is done to merit enhanced payments and for claiming from colleges at least a part of the required funds. Simpler principles and financial exchanges may prove more acceptable and effective. Council should bring clearer proposals to Congregation and not envelop them within a more far-reaching statute.
Council identifies the central dilemma we must discuss today: 'the desirability on the one hand of greater differentiation to enable the University to recruit, retain, and reward key staff, and on the other hand the danger this might present to collegiality and collaboration'.
Last year, the predecessors to the present Council explicitly rejected any 'intrusive' scheme for performance-related pay and proposed instead that lecturers and readers, like professors, might apply individually for salary enhancement. As the explanatory note tells us, the resources available for the scheme were 'widely perceived as inadequate to reward all deserving cases appropriately'. Therefore, it argues, in the name of 'flexibility', that fewer people should be rewarded from limited funds.
The Vice-Chancellor is to be given the power, which he already has in the case of professors, to enhance the salary payments of readers and lecturers in 'exceptional cases relating to the overwhelming academic importance of retaining, rewarding, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) recruiting key distinguished academic staff'. Proposals are to be made by the appointed heads of divisions and to be funded from divisional resources.
There are several objections to these proposals. In effect, they encourage members of the University to seek higher-paid posts elsewhere as the only means of establishing their case for additional pay. Anybody offered a post at the University will be advised to bargain for a salary enhancement at that time. The implications of such an incentive structure for either retention or recruitment are ambiguous and its outcomes quite uncertain. They will discriminate against those who, once appointed, wish to pursue their academic careers in Oxford.
Additional payments will be made according to the criteria of the national and international academic market place. Within the UK, this is driven by the prospective value each academic brings to the research assessment exercise. We shall be encouraged to do those things that can and will be measured and that command a price, and discouraged from spending any more time than we can avoid on things that are not or cannot be measured. Much of the work of the University and its colleges depends on these.
In order to ensure that each does their share, we shall extend the elaborate points systems which are already in use for measuring our units of teaching, for counting our examining, and for adding up our contributions to the administrative work of the University and the colleges. These can work when they identify, in broad terms, what we each expect of one another and what we can reasonably be asked to do. But once they are used to evaluate our jobs or as an instrument for management, the rules of measurement and their application will be open to endless argument and dispute. Goodwill will be lost and it will prove more difficult to get anybody to do anything in the public interest.
Under the proposals before us, decisions will be opaque and discretionary and accessible through a single gatekeeper. Lobbying skills, by applicants and their heads of division, will be at a premium. This is a recipe for academic patronage. The costs of salary enhancements will fall on divisions. They will thus reduce the funds for filling appointments and limit the resources available for other applicants. There is no provision for the division to discuss or decide on this commitment of its limited resources.
Heads of divisions will, in all cases, have 'to provide firm evidence that the award would not lead to unacceptable salary anomalies within the division'. This may not be possible. The proposal is that some people be paid more money than their colleagues for carrying out the same broadly defined responsibilities. Unless it is clear that they do more work than others, or do their jobs better, such additional payments will be anomalous. By definition.
We have no yardsticks for defining 'more' or 'better' and no procedures for comparing relative claims. Anomalies must result.
Anomalies will be resented. Rumours of secret payments to the deserving, let alone the undeserving, will accentuate resentment. Each of us may wish the University to consider our special case. Once allowance is made for differences among individuals, provisions will have to be extended to make it possible to reward other individuals. The proposals will be unstable.
There are two possible outcomes to this process. One is to individualise pay negotiations so that we each bargain with our heads of departments and divisions for better salaries. The other is to institutionalise a system of rewarding staff according to measured criteria of performance. Individual RAE assessments, achieved or anticipated, may become the currency of assessment for pay negotiation.
There are some disciplines in which recruitment is more difficult than in others. It may be that we have to pay economists more than we need to pay medieval historians, or politics tutors, to teach Oxford undergraduates. Preferring one individual economist over another will not avoid the instability to which I have already alluded. It would simply be better and clearer to pay all economists more than we pay politics tutors. That solution, too, is unstable as each discipline, or sub-discipline, makes its own special case, citing the particular posts for which a candidate of international standing could not be recruited.
Council asks us today to approve the preamble to a far-reaching statute. The statute provides for Council to make 'awards in recognition of academic distinction or contribution to academic work of the University in accordance with arrangements to be determined from time to time by Council'. It makes no qualification or requirement that it first put these arrangements before Congregation.
Council has done so without drawing the attention of members of Congregation to the wider context in which it will have to consider such arrangements. In December 2000 HEFCE demanded that universities adopt a 'human resources strategy' to meet its requirements. The reward to Oxford for satisfying HEFCE is £2,145,000 in the year 2001--2 and likely, on my calculations, to amount to £9.9 million over the three years, 2001-4. HEFCE asked the University to reply to three leading questions by 12 February, which I understand it did. These developments are alluded to in the preamble, where mention is made of additional funds, some of which relate to salaries, but there is no explicit reference to the HEFCE document or its implications for Council's deliberations.
We do not know whether the proposals for salary flexibility are designed to meet the first stage of HEFCE's demands, specifically that we show how we are going to 'address recruitment and retention difficulties in a targeted and cost-effective manner' (HEFCE). If so, it will not satisfy HEFCE. By the following year, 2002--3, if we want the money, we shall have to introduce 'annual performance reviews of all staff, based on open and objective criteria, with rewards connected to the performance of individuals including, where appropriate, their contributions to teams' (HEFCE).
The University is, indeed, subject to external pressures from an unholy alliance of market and state. We may have to bow, as we have done in the past, to superior financial power. Congregation should not vote today to leave the matter in Council's hands without the chance to discuss, in detail and in principle, how we should respond to these demands. I therefore ask Congregation to vote against the preamble.
There are, unfortunately, one or two little problems. The Government will not give the University enough money to achieve these laudable aims, and it is going to 'take some time to work through' what is involved in the University's decision to reapportion its resources with some greater weighting towards salaries.
For the time being, then, the University wants to do what little it can to 'ease pressure over the recruitment, retention, and recognition and reward of staff' by, in various ways, allowing itself just a bit more 'flexibility' in what it pays individual staff members.
Additional payments will be made, of course, only in 'exceptional cases'. We learn, after all, that when the previous proposals for a scheme of 'merit awards' were discussed around the University, there was forthcoming a 'very widespread acceptance'—no, an 'almost universal opinion'—that 'it was not appropriate for the University to be unable in any case, however exceptional the circumstances, to offer individual lecturers a salary beyond the top point of the current scales', 'wrong that in no case should additional payments ever be available ... however strong the academic imperative'. These very exceptional payments, made in response to the strongest academic imperatives, are therefore the most (or is it the least?) the Personnel Committee feels it can do in order to 'raise morale among staff'.
Hang on, though. How is it all going to work? Who is going to be getting the 'additional emoluments' referred to in the new statute? What will they be getting them for? How much will they be? How are the decisions about the awards going to be made, and who is going to make them?
One thing that is presumably fairly certain is that the total amount available is not going to stretch very far. We have heard as much already today. The University dropped its scheme of a year ago in large part because it could not afford the £750K it was proposing to allocate to it, and that was a sum that was widely seen as being wholly inadequate for the purpose (and could not be confidently expected to remain available on a recurrent basis). Now, under the new proposal, the funds will have to be squeezed out of existing divisional budgets. Is this somehow a better basis on which to make a serious response to the problems identified by the Personnel Committee?
How are the awards to be decided? The explanatory note observes that the previous merit awards scheme was widely seen as involving extravagantly elaborate procedures, for the sake of a meagre potential outcome. The new plan very efficiently sweeps away these 'time-consuming procedures' by leaving it to divisional heads to put forward a case for each award. We wonder, perhaps, how much variation there will be between divisions in the degree of enthusiasm with which they embrace this new opportunity, or indeed what interesting discussions will ensue within divisions as to which subject areas will benefit from it.
On what basis will divisional heads make allocations for awards from their increasingly slender financial resources? The last sentence of the explanatory note says that the proposed new statute 'extends the availability of merit awards to lecturers and the equivalent of professorial distinction awards to readers', which sounds to me rather as though the primary aim is what is sometimes called the 'rewarding of merit'. In the paragraphs immediately preceding that sentence, however, it is explained that the statute is to create 'a mechanism ... to enable the making of additional payments to lecturers in exceptional cases relating to the overwhelming academic importance of recruiting, retaining, and rewarding key and distinguished staff'. How is a divisional head, I wonder, to produce a case to demonstrate the 'overwhelming academic importance' of rewarding one of the division's lecturers except when an issue of recruitment or retention has arisen? Even if he were minded to do so, what chance is there of such a meritorious case surviving? Suppose, for example, the divisional head is simultaneously faced with a lecturer on the point of leaving for a job elsewhere, or a prospective new appointee deemed to be an essential acquisition but showing reluctance to come to Oxford, either of which difficulty may be removed by the offer of more pay? Given the limitations on funding, can we really believe that these awards will in practice be used in circumstances other than attempts to bribe people to come or not to go? Once again, as with the previous merit awards proposals, the University has hopelessly muddled the two real but quite distinct issues of recruitment and retention, on the one hand, and the reward of merit on the other. It—the University—and we should at least be clear that the reward of merit in existing members of the University's staff is not going to be addressed by the proposed system of awards unless the lecturer concerned has a better salary offer to bargain with.
I alluded a few moments ago to one kind of divisiveness likely to result from these confused proposals, namely that arising when the divisional head decides that one department's claims are trumped by another's—and he or she will certainly have to make such decisions on a regular basis. We will see, in such cases, the rapid triumph of the labourers in certain fields—the ones whose services are thought to command the best prices in what we former professionals have learned to call the job market—over their less glamorous counterparts in adjacent pastures. And we will have moved another significant step further towards an acceptance that we will no longer adhere to the principle that all the disciplines that the University chooses to foster are of equal academic worth, and those teaching and researching in them worthy of equal rewards. As the Committee on Academic Salaries very rightly said in 1996, rejecting the idea that professorial distinction awards should be designed so as to assist recruitment and retention: 'To follow the "market" principle would inevitably lead to differential salaries being paid as a function of the field of the post (since the University's current arrangements for stipends are variably uncompetitive by subject). The committee does not think that this would be appropriate. It is in any case much less easy for this University than for others to apply the market principle since Oxford is unusual in employing, and seeking to recruit, a "galaxy of stars". Moreover the University is more used to distinguishing between individuals on grounds of distinction rather than on the basis of market forces.' [Supplement (1) to Gazette No. 4388, 29 January 1996, p. 673.] We will see, too, the exacerbation of the already strikingly large and inequitable variations in the pay of joint appointees according to the chance (as it mainly is) of which college a person belongs to. It seems a long while since Sir Peter North's Commission of Inquiry recommended the abolition of housing allowances and other college additions to salary in favour of an increase in the joint maximum. This was expressly in order to apply the principle of 'equal reward for work of equal value' to joint appointments. In fact it was only in 1997, although the recommendation has long since been allowed to sink from sight. The differences between colleges in research allowances and other aids to academic work are going to have quite an effect on a lecturer's success in establishing the 'merit' which makes him or her seem essential to a division's work (or at least, its research profile), or which helps him or her to get a pay-enhancing job offer elsewhere.
Council has seen fit to propose this change in the University's statutes without specific consultation with the University at large, no doubt arguing that the discussion of last year's merit awards proposals covered all the necessary ground. But what we have here is a substantially different scheme, which will raise not only issues considered last year but also some new ones. We should have had a chance to give thought to the scheme envisaged before it became a firm proposal for change.
And it is not minor change. Council is asking for unlimited authority to determine the pay of individual members of staff. The terms in which the new powers are expressed are not so very different, it is true, from those already conferred by statute. But it is significant that whereas the existing wording stipulates that the now defunct General Board, in its determination of the salaries of non-medical lecturers, 'shall have regard to, but shall not be bound by, scales related to age', these words are absent from the new statute. In the present climate, with constant external pressures for the abandonment of long-established principles in salary determination, the omission of even such a cautious and non-committal form of words is a move to be resisted. We are watching a further creep towards a much more significantly individualised salary system, with all the unfairnesses and conflicts that will entail. Professors were some while ago allowed distinction awards, so now we should offer them to all. The competitiveness of the job market means we now decide to pay a bit more to a select few marketable people, so in a year or two's time we may as well let ourselves be pushed into a more general acceptance of differential pay. There does seem to be a pattern there somewhere.
Many of us will, I hope, reject the principles implicit in the change of statute we are considering today. All of us should recognise that the proposal as it stands is muddled and unpersuasive, and that the issues at stake are very important ones on which we need to have a period of serious and open debate. I therefore second my colleague's request to you to vote 'no' today.
In both cases the academics in question were university lecturers in specialisms that are in short supply when it comes to recruiting world-class researchers. Both were at the top of the joint maximum scale, having been awarded the additional increments that were permitted at the time. Both received offers from institutions that are in direct competition with the social sciences of this University. One of the individuals contacted me directly to ask what the University might be able to do to match the outside offer. In the other case I was contacted in some desperation by the head of department. In both cases the answer was, 'Nothing can be done.' Both members of staff subsequently left, with serious consequences for teaching and research in their particular areas. If Oxford is to remain world-class in research in the social sciences, we cannot afford to lose such talented scholars. With the proposed statute and procedure we would at least be able to open a conversation with such people in a bid to keep them here.
One objection to the statute is an understandable concern that merit awards to university lecturers might create jealousies and loss of morale among those who have not been so rewarded. In the cases to which I have alluded, I have little doubt that their outstanding contribution would have been acknowledged widely within their departments, and the case for merit awards would not have been disputed. Their colleagues might of course have been jealous of their abilities, but there is not much that we can do about that I would also note that there was a very considerable loss of morale in those departments when outstanding colleagues left to work elsewhere, and that is an impact which I think we need to take very seriously into consideration.
A second implied objection is that the statute is introducing, by a back-door method, differentials based on market conditions. I rather agree with Mr Williams that that is an issue which we are going to have to address sooner rather than later, given the level of competition in the labour market for highly qualified people in disciplines such as law, economics, and finance. But a general uplift of salaries for those in particular disciplines is not, and is specifically not, envisaged in this legislation. The mechanism described in the preamble makes it clear, and this has been emphasised, that only exceptional cases, relating to an overwhelming academic case, will be considered. Very importantly, the mechanism also makes it clear that divisions, and in my division the departments, will pick up the cost of merit awards. In the present, and likely to be continuing, financial stringency, that is not something which will be taken on lightly or generally. I judge that the number of awards will be few, even in a division like the Social Sciences, where the problem of poaching by other institutions is acute.
These quite modest reforms to academic salaries have been welcomed and endorsed by the Social Sciences Divisional Board. We need this scheme if we are to have any hope of retaining some of our most distinguished colleagues among the ranks of university lecturers.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg to support the promulgation.
It is a commonplace that language is affected by environment. Anyone who served on the General Board became accustomed to hearing the phrase, 'The devil is in the detail.' There are here a multitude of details yet to be explored and devils to be exorcised. I will argue that without appropriate checks and balances enshrined in the principles drawn up by Council, the proposals could easily bring undesirable, far-reaching, and destabilising changes with unsought-after fallout on departments, colleges, and individual members of the University. I accept that the proposals are intended as a package. However, they address such a wide range of issues that they deserve to lie on the woolsack for a few more weeks, to allow for the good-housekeeping seal of approval to be sought.
The issues here also provide a good test of the new governance. Whilst accepting the need for stronger central leadership on policy matters and the desirability of devolution to divisions and departments for matters of detail, there will always remain a need for appropriate consultation and balance between the centre and its divisions. I will identify points where central control and consultation, in particular with the Conference of Colleges, could produce better law.
We all appreciate that the proposals are in large measure driven by market forces and financial constraints; but surely they should be dosed with a modicum of fairness? In considering how the proposals affect the collegiate University, I want to look, mostly, at the issues of recruitment, retention, burdens—and fairness.
In a number of disciplines, the field of applicants for CUF lecturerships has been dwindling. This is probably due both to conditions/burdens and, for younger staff at least, to low salary levels. We still make few appointments which are not rather strong, but all who arrive in Oxford are faced with the same expensive housing market. Under the proposed arrangements, what proportion of the lowest paid will receive what sort of salary boost to combat this? As money is in short supply, will/should any increment depend on a means-test? (Except perhaps for rather exceptional cases, should we in fact have 'research-blind' admission support?) And what comparison will be made with the lowest paid amongst those already in post? And who will check how evenly all this is applied across the faculties? Council does not provide us with any statistics to show how the additional salary scale points available over the last couple of years have been distributed amongst the faculties, to which age groups, and at what cost. My experience on the General Board's Appointments Committee does not suggest that procedures in this regard are robust enough. I also doubt the effectiveness of additional scale-points as a means of retention (I speak as a former faculty board chairman): the really high research flyer can get a far larger professorial salary elsewhere, which makes our few puny points seem insignificant. My experience is quite contrary to that of Mr Hay.
And what about anomalies? In respect of the proposed payments beyond the joint maximum, we note that a head of division would have 'to provide firm evidence that the award would not lead to unacceptable salary anomalies'. How will/how can this be tested or policed? And why is this not in any case a requirement for movement within the scale also, on or after appointment? And if the joint maximum is breached, how would the collegiate University prevent colleges collaborating or going it alone? And should it?
These must be matters for discussions between Council and the Conference of Colleges before legislation is enacted. Surely, an absolute necessity, as a quid pro quo to stabilise and protect teaching arrangements in respect of both general salary and ULNTF proposals, must be that no joint appointee be allowed to resign only the college part of a joint appointment. But I see no reference to this in what has been spelled out in the Gazette.
Let me construct a likely scenario for you. A head of division, keen to protect RAE grades, requests salary increments to allow a lecturer to afford to resign the college half of a joint appointment. The college's chance of refilling its vacancy is delayed more than usual because the division has depleted its resources with the award of extra points on the scale. Schools discover that the continuity of the college's much-vaunted tutorial arrangements has been interrupted, and the tutorial burdens in the faculty on other lecturers necessarily increase. Surely these issues must be further discussed by Bursars and Senior Tutors before Council's principles are set in concrete?
Burdens is a recruitment, retention, and fairness issue. It is very disappointing that in face of the Gazette statement that 'the level of burdens is in the eyes of many by far the most important issue', the Personnel Committee can only come up with the proposal that subject-areas should look into their teaching arrangements. At best, very uneven relief can be achieved in this way (yes, there will always be some issues that are too important to be left to the discretion of divisions alone), whereas for years the University has been telling us that CUF lecturers (I declare an interest) are overburdened across the board. The University has, in the past, provided trade-offs and relief schemes centrally, in the first instance for CUFs specifically. Proposals on contracts only seem to juggle the same load and the units in which it is to be measured (I wonder, how accurately?) between college and University. I reiterate: this is clearly a recruitment, retention, and fairness issue—but where is the injunction obliging all faculties to move towards, say, a 288-unit load, with progress towards this goal closely monitored? Might we not now expect that resources will be allocated to divisions in proportion to the number of lecturers and type of lecturer specifically for burden relief? This will be expensive and take time to introduce. However, it must be part of our strategy from the outset if we are to provide proper conditions for academic staff already in post, as well as to attract the best young research talent to apply for an Oxford lecturership.
I leave the reintroduction of the recognition of distinction exercise aside: those who have heard General Board discussions on the matter over the last three years and the views of heads of department can only smile at any claim of unanimity on this issue And as with the award of salary points, will not Oxford be showing its preference for science by allowing its continuance (because our arts colleagues will not apply)? May I say it is a pleasure to see so many heads of science departments here today.
In summary, I suggest that before legislation is enacted, Council's principles be amended to include the following, and that the implementation of the statute should depend on the various agreements specified being struck:
(1) A lecturer shall not be permitted to resign from the college part of a joint appointment only.
(2) High priority will be given to increasing salary levels at the bottom of the scale for all appointees (with an expectation that between them colleges will ensure that housing allowances reach an agreed level).
(3) High priority will be given to reducing burdens on lecturers (indeed, on all academic staff) to, say, 288 units over a prescribed period of years and central resources allocated to divisions proportionally on that basis.
(4) Council will seek an agreement with the Conference of Colleges for payments above the joint maximum.
(5) The mechanism under Council's principle (g) to govern salary payments above the joint maximum shall be applied in the same way to movements within the age–wage scale, and arrangements for testing that no unacceptable anomalies occur both within divisions and across all divisions will be agreed with the Conference of Colleges.
(6) Council will seek agreement with the Conference of Colleges on review, monitoring, and reporting procedures on all matters covered by the legislation and, in particular, confidential reports to the Personnel Committee will be shared with the Standing Committee of the Conference.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I hope you will use your best endeavours to ensure that these assurances are incorporated into Council's principles and that the final enactment of legislation is delayed until the necessary consultations have taken place. These are matters of fairness, balance, and transparency and vital to the aims of the University in the twenty-first century.
Performance-related pay was mentioned by Mr Williams and would certainly represent a major change in Oxford's employment culture. My understanding is that it has yet to be fully discussed in the context of the HEFCE initiative, and in any event, the matter that we are discussing today, that is, the statute in question, in no way implies any particular assumption about the way that that initiative should be addressed. The retention and recruitment arguments that have been discussed in detail already this afternoon are deployed in relation to varying readers' and lecturers' salaries. They do indeed have to do with market conditions, as Mr Hay said, and those conditions tend to prevail in very specific subjects in very individual cases. I do not see that they have a bearing on providing incentives or targets for individuals more generally.
It is of course the case that the HEFCE initiative will force us to address at some point the matter of rewards based on incentives. I should say the arguments are not all on one side, and I think one needs to look very carefully at them when they emerge. It is after all possible that if universities had joined some years ago in the public service trend to incentive salary schemes they might have done rather better in funding terms than they have in fact done. It is also the case that many versions of these schemes that the public sector has adopted have been rather less objectionable than the horrors that Mr Williams was conjuring up. Indeed many of them would involve little more than the personal research and teaching plans of the individuals who are subjected to them. But in any event these questions will not be affected one way or the other by today's proposals.
I know there is a real concern that what we are talking about today might set back any prospect of restoring the sort of pay levels that we had before the late 1970s. I cannot see that that is necessarily the case, though it is easy to understand the concerns that give rise to that kind of contention. The explanatory note makes emphatically clear that consideration of such a general improvement of salaries should be treated as a fundamental aim during the next two or three years, and indeed be built into the first stages of budget building every year rather than simply being left to the end when there is no money left to spend in such a cause. The explanatory note also spells out that the present constraints which prevent a significant increase in general salary levels derive partly from previous failures to adopt that kind of systematic planning approach as well as from the funding deficiencies which we all recognise. And above all the explanatory note emphasises that the flexibility now sought for lecturers' salaries, as Mr Hay emphasised, will only be used in exceptional cases that do not prejudice the question of overall wage uplift.
Much has been said of collegiality, and that is something that goes to the heart of what we believe in in Oxford, but I do wonder whether it is wise to tie it so closely and systematically to the long-standing joint maximum that governs the lecturers' pay scale in particular. At any rate, if we are to die in the last ditch for such an unglamorous-sounding thing as the joint maximum, it does behove us to be aware of its precise significance. Mention has already been made of the procedures by which colleges, in effect, evade some of the effects of the joint maximum. After all, for any individual lecturer it is not the joint maximum that determines the quantity and quality of rewards but the total package of pay and conditions. We are all aware surely that for many years colleges have proved quite adept at designing such packages for their fellows, employing a variety of allowances in fact, in order to enhance the joint maximum. The result is a good deal of difference between the way colleges treat their employees, creating a great mass of vested interests and making it hard to compare the lot even of those working in similar fields with similar burdens but situated in different colleges. This is a form of collegiality that in the strictest sense stops at the college gate. To the extent, by today's proposal, that the University will have regard to the sum of college allowances in any particular case where it is proposed to make additional payments, this legislation will in some small degree actually act as a corrective measure in some instances. Of course, what is obvious to us all is that this mess desperately needs sorting out at some point in the not-too-distant future. But I think to argue the importance of the joint maximum at this stage, and in this specific argument or debate, for the sake of preserving intact the present system, would attribute to that system a rationality that it certainly lacks
Today's measures are plainly not an attempt at a major strategic departure nor could they attempt to be. It seems to me rather that they represent a sensible set of answers to some pressing and awkward questions, some of which have been in agitation for a long time. They do not prejudge what is to be done on the broader matters that interest all of us on both sides of today's question. I think we would do well to complete this preliminary business so that the new governing structure can get to grips with the really important policy decisions, not least those that bear on academic salaries at large, and as soon as possible.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I beg to support the preamble.
The Personnel Committee is a heterogeneous committee which reflects within itself many of the tensions and much of the diversity of the university body, and it may not surprise you to hear that many of the discussions we are having today remind me of discussions that took place within the committee itself. The committee was divided on some of the points on which Congregation today is divided. But I do not want to suggest that the outcome represented the victory of one section of the committee over another section of the committee. Rather, there was the usual process of arguing, exchanging ideas, trying to find some sort of mutually acceptable balance. We have issues here on which repeated Congregation debates have shown that the University is deeply divided, and these divisions run through certain sectors of the University, but they also run within the heads of many of us, who feel torn between different imperatives and ideals.
I would like to take up two points that have emerged from the opponents' remarks. First of all, some of the more general issues which are addressed in the Personnel Committee's paper are not the subject of today's motion. It is not the case that in approving the preamble today, Congregation will be approving what are certainly the rather vaguely conceived indications the Personnel Committee has given of the direction in which it plans to move, or hopes to move, on other fronts. As the explanatory note itself says, the Personnel Committee will continue to discuss the detailed arrangements that might be made to carry these proposals forward, and much will hang, in this as in other cases, on what these detailed arrangements are. So this is not a case of a blank cheque being given to the Personnel Committee to carry all these proposals forward. The point of putting forward various rather vaguely conceived proposals was to provide a context in which people would see that what is proposed here is not to carry the whole weight of sorting out the University's personnel strategy. This is only a small part, in fact a very small part I would hope, of the way in which the University will move forwards.
Secondly, I might say on the suggestion that further consultation is necessary for all these proposals to be carried forwards that up to a point I am certainly in favour of consultation. I think debates like the one we are having today can be a useful part of that process. But, speaking as a CUF lecturer who has now been twenty years in the University, who for the last ten years has been involved in discussions about how we can rationalise burdens, who has seen proposals, though acceptable both to my faculty and to my college, blocked because the collective decision-making processes of the University bring in other people who are not sympathetic to the resolution of these questions, I have many doubts about the repeated seeking of consensus among all bodies across the University before we resolve the teaching issues that arise in particular parts of it. So that I would hope we can be selective in our more elaborate consultation exercises, and make intermittent testings of opinion, and use other forms of consultation—through the divisional faculty structure, and through Congregation debate—to sound opinion on smaller issues.
The particular issues that are highlighted in the motion today are intended, as has been said, very much as a stop-gap. They are a minor part of the Personnel Committee's and Council's vision of how the University should move forwards. I agree with many of the things, perhaps all of the things, that have been said by way of expressing doubt about what might happen, particularly if they come to play a larger part in how the University proceeds. Yes, they are an inadequate way of recognising merit; that is certainly true. They tend to favour payments to those who have been recruited or who need to be retained and not to staff in place; that is very unsatisfactory, and we need better ways of recognising the merit of staff in place. But everything is going to depend on how the balance between these specific proposals and the larger plans outlined in the paper are struck. I am a historian, I do not pretend to be able to see the future; I do not know how this is going to work out. What I am sure is that the determinants of the future will be complex and will include the ethos which is shared among many people in the University and, as I have said, also represented on Personnel Committee, which is very wary of allowing these sorts of ideas to go too far.
Finally, it seems to me that Gavin Williams's request, that the relationship between these proposals and the HEFCE proposals be clarified, is a reasonable one. I think the reason why the HEFCE proposals are not referred to here is because it is in no way intended that what is before Congregation today be the University's way of carrying forward what HEFCE has asked for. The two sets of proposals emerged independently. The response of the Personnel Committee to the HEFCE proposals was almost entirely negative. They were thought to be an unhelpful, impolitic, overly prescriptive, inadequately funded vision of how personnel matters might be handled in future. I am sure the University will do its best to see that these things are handled better.
Mr Vice-Chancellor, I would like to support the preamble.
My primary argument in favour of this is one that we have heard already this afternoon: we are merely one component of a competitive world. Our academic staff has freedom to move from university to university both within and outwith the United Kingdom, and the more talented our staff members are, the more likely it becomes that well-planned attempts will be made to attract them elsewhere. We cannot safely assume that we are so strong as to be immune from this kind of competition. Lecturers in Oxford who have reached their mid-forties and are being paid at the joint maximum have no very obvious career prospects to look forward to if they elect to stay here for the next twenty years, but they do face an entirely predictable, gradually worsening standard of living: this makes for a pretty dreary outlook. So why would the best people at this point in their lives elect to spend the rest of their academic careers in Oxford, if there are well-calculated offers of better options elsewhere?
At present, to the extent that we have any particular thoughts about how to ensure that such people stay, it seems to tend to come down to our intellectual capital—other outstanding academics, first-rate students, and a history of valuing excellence are all powerful attractions. We can top that up with the undeniable beauty of the place, and the varied pleasures of our collegiate lives. Taken together, these are no mean assets; but our ability to retain our intellectual magnetism relies on our ability to keep enough of the best people here. Now we have, of course, great strength in depth; we do not just rely on our statutory professors and readers to provide academic leadership, and to attract other outstanding appointees. Our extended range of outstanding people is, after all, what motivates my concerns. But if we lose enough of our intellectual capital assets, I do not believe we will be able to find the new resources necessary to rebuild them. Beautiful buildings simply will not be enough; it is the living University that is the key asset we have to defend. I contend that we do need to be able to marshal extra reasons for people to stay. I hope that we would also want to do our best to reward people of outstanding quality.
Now, I recognise that these kinds of comments may seem a bit abstract, divorced of real, specific examples. All I can say in response to that is that I do know, at first hand, real examples of friends and colleagues who have left Oxford, or are planning to leave Oxford, because they do not see how they can afford not to do so. They are concerned at how they will manage financially if they stay here to retiring age. Part of this, I suppose, may stem from demographic changes. There has been a clear tendency for people to start their families later; one of my own children will still be at university (if they make it and if I can afford it) when I retire, but I have colleagues older than I am with children who are younger than mine. I do not think that it is unrealistic for such people to care about their financial futures; and I think that it would be unrealistic of us to refuse to figure out what we can do about this situation. There are better financial prospects available elsewhere for our best staff members; and we should do our best to ensure that Oxford is at least as appealing a prospect.
Why might we not go ahead? One argument is that any scheme would simply be impractical: we would not have a defensible mechanism for making the selections; and even if we did, it would use up too much valuable time. I suppose one answer to this is that our competitors manage to do it, and we ought to be able to manage at least as well as they do. Another is that such a scheme would be divisive: that the cost of upsetting those who fail to obtain discretionary awards might outweigh the happiness of those who succeed. Well, that will depend on how many such awards there are, and at what level. We do need to ensure that we deliver a pay-off matrix that works in the interests of the collegiate University. A variant of this, of course, is concern about the envy of those who do not have awards and who have to sit down and work with people doing essentially the same job who are paid more. All I can say here is that I spend a lot of time working alongside my better paid colleagues in clinical medicine, and it does not really seem very difficult.
Why do we need to pass the motion? Could we not wait until it is all worked out properly and then vote on a specific package? I do not think we should take that option seriously. Why would anyone bother to spend the time working on something that is bound to be difficult unless they believed that they are aiming for a shared goal? To say, 'Go ahead,' but without any sense of at least outline approval of the underlying idea would be the worst kind of stalling (I appreciate that kicking into touch in this way is an effective technique but I think it is hard to represent it as an intellectually admirable way of resolving problems).
The motion gives us the chance to develop stratagems for looking after our own institution and its membership. I would not want us to remain passive in the face of changes elsewhere, and trust that Congregation will support the motion.
First of all, at the bottom end in terms of recruitment, we have made four appointments to university lecturerships since the new division was created, and three of those we would not have been able to make without the flexibility to go above the age–wage scale, so additional flexibility is going to be extremely welcome and helpful in recruitment.
Secondly, the point was made by, I think, Dr Williams about the current lecturers having a sort of line to the head of division and getting things through with regard to enhancing their own salary. Our division has set up, under the head, Dr Fleming, a small group who will very carefully scrutinise and look at these issues. There will not be a one-man band, and of course heads of department will be involved.
Thirdly, in relation to anomalies that might be created, the current situation in going above the age–wage scale requires the anomalies to be looked at. The head of department has to assure the Appointments Committee that no anomalies will be created, so that is actually in place at the moment.
Finally, and I think for me most important, is the issue of the university lecturers at the top of the joint maximum. I feel, as a Schedule A Professor, extremely embarrassed that we have a merit-award system for Schedule A Professors, but my equally distinguished or more distinguished colleagues who are university lecturers and titular professors or readers do not, and at least the proposal in front of us today would correct that extraordinary anomaly in this University.
So I would like to encourage you to support the motion.
It does seem to me that we are being asked to approve a very wide-ranging authority for Council. It may well be that the current intention is merely to achieve this very small aim which is being presented to us, but it does seem to me a rather large sledgehammer, in that case, to crack this particular nut, to leave too many risks in the future, and to be an inappropriate and insufficiently thought-out, and certainly insufficiently consulted-on, proposal for us to accept today. I remain firmly of the view that we should reject it.
For example, I argued that the proposed arrangements would create a perverse incentive structure, in which people would be encouraged to seek jobs elsewhere as the only way of enhancing their salaries. That the incentive to maximise one's saleability in the market through the forms of research performance which are recognised and certified, which is not quite the same thing as doing research and publishing it, would take precedence over other sorts of commitments which most of us do find, at least at the margins, to be burdensome, though I am among those who find teaching delightful; and this will create a set of administrative problems which will not be met by specifying in detail the levels of and by counting our teaching, administrative, and examining obligations. For somebody who is not going to be in a position of trying to get his colleagues to do these things, I can only say I shall be very grateful and I wish those many of you here today who are going to have to do them well in trying to do this.
Professor Rawlins thought it was intellectually not admirable to suggest that what we need to do with this resolution is to kick it into touch. As a South African, I know about kicking into touch, and I would like to extend the metaphor. When you kick a ball into touch the ball goes back into the field; my suggestion is that the ball should go back into the field when the rules of the game have been specified, as is not yet the case.
I appreciate that we do suffer losses to other universities. We are told that there are few very important cases and that the relatively small sums of money involved will be very carefully allocated. We are also told that we are full of people who are not adequately rewarded and who will have the aspiration to go through the glass ceiling, i.e. that there will be many people whom we will need to reward under these sorts of proposals. It does not seem to me that we can argue on the one hand, as Dr Walker did, that the Personnel Committee does not wish to allow our salaries and the organisation of the University to be determined by the market place, and then to be told that we must allocate salaries in accordance with a particular, rather narrow aspect of the market, because, after all, the market for a particular sector of academic employees is not the market as a whole.
And I have to say to my colleague Ms Innes that I do not understand her view that this affects only a small part of the market, only in some areas, and only a small number of individuals. Markets do not work like that: they are not insulated from one another and they do interact in determining the forces, in determining the prices, even the prices at which different universities are wishing to bid for academic jobs.
So I continue with my argument that the procedures are unclear. We are told, for example, that the resolution is a separate question from the proposals of the Joint Working Party, which are to be put forward by the Personnel Committee. For anybody who read the explanatory note, which discusses at some length the work of the Personnel Committee, it might have been reasonable to think that some of those proposals were relevant to these and that there might be some relationship between them. If there is a relationship between them, we are still awaiting proper consultation with colleges, and indeed with departments and, certainly in my case, sub-faculties, of those proposals before anybody can say that they are ready for discussion; and that seems to have been accepted by Ms Innes, who is a member of the Personnel Committee, so I am not sure how it is right to separate a key element, at least spelt out at some length in the explanatory note, from the preamble to the statute.
It is also not clear to me why a statute which is drawn in very broad terms, with no specific qualifications or requirements that specific proposals which Council might agree to should be brought back to Congregation, needs to be drawn up in that form, and why we are not thereby being asked to vote for a lot of things down the line which we were unaware of when the vote took place.
I argued that the proposals are unstable, and it appears from what Mr Hay says and from what Professor Rawlins says that this is indeed likely to be the case. If we are going to allow particular rules in specific cases for exceptional reasons, we will find that there is, quite reasonably, given not least the distinction of many members of the University, a multiplication of exceptional cases. The rules will therefore be unstable. If the rules are unstable, we must make decisions not on what we think the first-round effects of those rules will be, but what those effects will be after a series of iterations.
We are told that HEFCE and the demands made by HEFCE are not relevant to this particular case—demands which HEFCE has publicly made and to which the University must make a response, and indeed is expected by HEFCE to arrive at a decision by the middle of this year. But to take one aspect of our potential response, which is to say that we have put in play procedures for retention, recruitment, and differential rewards, without recognising that this will not meet HEFCE requirements, seems to me to evade the issues which either Council does not plan to bring to Congregation or which will have to come back to Congregation within the current academic year. That being the case, it seems to me that the proposals are untimely.
To summarise, I think the proposals are unclear, undesirable, unstable, untimely. I also think that they are incoherent, and either that the arguments that have been made for them are internally contradictory, or that arguments made by one speaker have contradicted another. I am therefore arguing to Council, not, 'Abandon these questions': we have no option but to look at and continue to think about these questions, but, 'Come back when you have thought through the implications and when you can put forward a more cogent and coherent set of proposals which we are ready to consider properly.'
One point on which I agree with Mr Williams is that we must avoid a perverse incentive structure, one in which people are encouraged to seek jobs elsewhere in order to gain a pay rise here. It is for exactly this reason that we need the flexibility not only to retain people, but also to reward those who are not thinking of leaving but who are equally deserving. This I think brings me into conflict with Mr Hoad, who believes that considerations of merit are sharply different in kind from considerations to do with recruitment and retention, and that the present proposals are wrong to bring them together. It is essential, however, that we treat people fairly and equally, if only to avoid the perverse incentive structure that so concerns Mr Williams. There appears to be some tension between the views of Mr Hoad and Mr Williams here; but perhaps I have misunderstood them.
Council's proposals today make no attempt to solve all the problems. We cannot afford to wait until all the problems are solved. If we are to retain our competitive position we must go ahead now and introduce the flexibilities proposed by Council and the Personnel Committee. These are needed, however we resolve the complex issues of what is called 'the relief of burdens'. It is true that discussions on those issues have been very protracted. I am sorry about this, and I bear as much responsibility as anyone for the delays. A great deal of progress has been made, nevertheless, and the matter has taken so much time because it has turned out to be extraordinarily complicated: more so, I think, than anyone really appreciated at the outset. The concerns of colleges have to be taken into account along with those of faculties and departments; there are numerous complexities that arise from the variety of different obligations that people currently have around the University. As the Principal has said, we now seem close to a resolution of the issue about ULNTFs. This issue has proved to be highly complex in itself, but if we can get it solved it is likely that the other problems will become more tractable.
We cannot wait until all the problems are solved; Mr Williams's appeal to the Principle of Unripe Time is out of place. We are not responding to potential threats from HEFCE, but to a pressure that is present, immediate, and due to the competitive character of the world we live in. We can regret that this pressure exists, but it is a reality, and we must respond to it now. If we leave the matter for another year, we risk losing people we cannot do without. What is at stake is our standing as an international university. What is needed is action; urgent action. I hope this House will support the promulgation, and will encourage Council to act urgently.
We are asking Congregation to support a modest element of potential flexibility at the top of the pay scale. This is available for virtually every other staff group in the University, and for our competitors. We have tried to answer positively the question, 'Can flexibility at the top of the lecturers' scale ever be permissible?' This would be used rarely, in consultation with colleges, and in cases of overwhelming academic importance. In contrast, the opposition suggests that such flexibility should never be permissible, however compelling the case.
It appears that we have not been heard when we have confirmed that there must be collaboration between the divisions and the colleges, in individual cases, if this preamble is supported. The question of how decisions will be reached has been raised, but this is set out clearly in the explanatory note and has been usefully glossed today.
It has been alleged that we lack coherence, particularly with regard to HEFCE's proposals. But it is not yet known what HEFCE's precise requirements of Oxford may be, or how much money there will be for this University, or how much there will be for academic as opposed to non-academic staff, or how much will be distributed across the board.
The proposals are designed to meet Oxford's own needs by introducing modest and carefully controlled measures alongside the operation of standard scales. The University will not be able to maintain its 'place at the top', in the more competitive academic world that it is in, without the possibility to reward, retain, and recruit lecturers in exceptional academic circumstances, by using flexibility above the top of the scale.
I invite you, therefore, to vote for the preamble.
The preamble was carried on a division [For, 44; Against, 20]. As fifty members of Congregation then demanded a postal vote, however, the approval of the preamble was not confirmed.
Ballot papers for the postal vote are being sent to members of Congregation and must be returned to the Registrar not later than 4 p.m. on Friday, 30 March, the date fixed by Mr Vice-Chancellor for holding the vote.