The response is somewhat disingenuous in terms of the Kingston UCU position, which is (and always has been) that we are against any redundancies but if these are unavoidable then our preference is for individually negotiated voluntary severances rather than compulsory redundancies.
As usual, KU management are consulting after making decisions when UCU should be involved in the decision-making processes to seek to mitigate job losses. There seems to be a clear and fixed intention already to make redundancies and a decision about how to make at least some of those redundancies seems to have been made. Voluntary redundancies are still redundancy dismissals in that an employer cannot decide on how many applications for voluntary redundancy to accept until it has decided upon where and how many redundancy dismissals may take effect. There is also an obligation to consult about ways to mitigate the effect of any dismissals and UCU have not been involved in this prior to the issuing of any VS notices. Given that there has been a portfolio review in KSA for a number of months now to which UCU has not been invited, we feel that it is very likely that the university is in breach of our Facilities Agreement with them. This is a very serious issue.