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Lancaster University to cut one in five academic jobs

<ÍøÆØÃÅ class="standfirst">Institution says it is ¡®not immune¡¯ to financial challenges as it looks to axe 400 jobs
June 20, 2025
Lancaster University
Source: iStock/Peter Shaw

Lancaster University has become the latest UK institution to announce large-scale cuts as it looks to save ?30 million.

The university has informed staff of plans to cut 400 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions by July 2026,?with?academics the first to go.

This will include more than 212 FTE academics, equating to almost one in five of the academic workforce, according to the University and College Union (UCU).?

Lancaster said it ¡°can¡¯t rule out the possibility of compulsory redundancies as a last resort¡± as the union branch plans a meeting next week to decide on a response to the cuts.

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The union added that the university is looking to cut more than ?35 million per annum from its annual expenditure by 2026-27, leaving every department at risk and ¡°no part of the university unaffected¡±.

A university spokesperson said Lancaster is ¡°not immune¡± to sector-wide financial pressures, including increased operating costs and declining international student numbers, but added that it will not be looking to close academic departments.?

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¡°We have achieved significant savings on non-payroll and through a voluntary severance scheme this year but unfortunately our financial projections show that payroll savings of about ?30 million are required over the next academic year to ensure our ongoing financial sustainability,¡± they said.

However, they continued, ¡°We are in a better financial position than some other universities, which has bought us time to work through strategic options, which will ensure that research and the student experience is prioritised and protected¡±.?

Jo Grady, UCU¡¯s general secretary, said it is ¡°simply impossible for Lancaster to bin such a huge proportion of its workforce and provide the same level of provision to students¡±.?

¡°As well as harming the livelihoods of those staff who are forced out, cuts of this magnitude would have a devastating impact on the staff who stay, students, the local community, and the university¡¯s standing in the academic community. Our members will meet next week, and a strike ballot cannot be ruled out if management refuses to change course.¡±

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It comes as academics raise concerns that widespread?university job cuts have entered a ¡°dangerous new phase¡±, with Liverpool Hope University, Cardiff Metropolitan and Arts University Bournemouth among those pressing ahead with compulsory redundancies.?

At Newcastle University, however, where union members have undertaken prolonged strike action, bosses have now ruled out compulsory redundancies, as well as offering students compensation for missed teaching.?

A university spokesperson said it had?achieved its ?20 million target of salary savings in full "without the need for compulsory redundancies" through a combination?of voluntary severance, redeployments,?and "a range of other mitigating measures"".

"This is an immensely challenging time for universities across the UK, and we are grateful to everyone in our community for their commitment and patience as we navigate towards long term financial sustainability," they added.?

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com

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<ÍøÆØÃÅ class="pane-title"> Reader's comments (11)
Oh dear, not another one! When will this nightmare end?
When the managers who failed are brought to account, as happened at Dundee.
I am afraid that only happens after the fact and when the institution is no longer viable at present.
Yep time for a rebellion in the Universities we need to put the academics in charge and start sacking en masse the failed managers and bureaucrats and each one made to explain exactly what they do to justify their existence. If they are useless or no value added (which is at least 50%) then instant dismissal.
I agree with you in general but in the case of my University which was one of the first to get into trouble and is now cutting jobs for the second time in two years, the VC was an academic who had worked in the institution for his whole career. He was useless. He resigned in ignominy to a well-funded retirement.
It goes on and on. One of the upshots of all of this and the sea change in university management style that goes along with it, is that you have ended up with a situation where the 'product' of the organisation - lecturers and students - is now the lowest down in the hierarchy and has almost zero agency any. We are ordered about by those with 'support' in their name, a name that once meant, support us, along with managers who tell us stuff and never ask us anything. And senior management are wondering why they are in trouble. It is like deciding the product your company sells and has built its reputation on and that is its financial foundation, is now irrelevant to the business.
Yes, I agree with the comments above. This is a perverse situation. The first to go should be non academic staff and buildings, other assets. Research and teaching should be preserved at all costs. Like much in the country and the world right now, the reverse is happening.
And we could lose all that EDI and HR empire, along with Advance HE and all those parasitic resource hungry consultancies and just focus on the roles of research and teaching with limited, relevant, efficient admin to support the things the University needs. I am not against the idea of assessment but the REF and TEF have become so extraordinarily onerous in the ways they impact on our work and resource that they need urgent reform and to be slimmed down. We seem to live in a meta-profession where most of our work and time is taken up with servicing things that are peripheral to the main tasks rather than the main tasks themselves. The managerialists of course love these things as it provides work for them and position and power.
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It's a Catch 22 on the buildings. They paid a fortune to build them and hamstrung their institutions with debt, but when you try to sell then you have to offload onto a market and the more that's offloaded the less the value of the assets. Some institution will say they have xx millions of estate but that's just another accountancy fiction. if they tried to realise the value of some of it then they would find the market rates it much lower and, in any case, they will still have the debt they are servicing and the covenants they entered into to fund. It's a real mess they got us into, and one that;s very hard to get out of, even for brilliant managers, and that they ain't!
I wonder in the job loss announcement stakes is it more advantageous to be first out of the traps as it were and announce redundancies straight away or to be go later and come up on the rails like Lancaster when everyone else has made these announcements in the hope the sector is so traumatised it won't respond? Surely, they must have known they would be doing tis months ago (and if not why not, everyone else worked it out?). I can see it working for admissions when everyone else takes the reputational hit and loses admissions while others say we are unaffected and get the numbers and then say, actually we are in the same boat as the rest in the hopes the students won't switch having committed themselves to some extent?
I think you very generously credit them with a degree of acumen and intelligence that they simply don't possess (look at Dundee). They probably didn't have good financial oversight or know what they were doing in the first place and this is the usual knee-jerk panic response. They tend to cover up these things as long as possible as we know. The management of so many Universities is beyond mediocre and verging on the incompetent. That's one of the reasons they pay themselves so much as a psychic defence against their inner realisation that are essentially sub standard.
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