Wes Streeting: Fair pay, yes, but let’s end the fat cat salaries for university bosses

Britain has one of the best higher education systems in the world, educating millions of students from across the world each year. Behind that success are hundreds of thousands of dedicated staff: from university leaders and academics to the wide range of support staff performing essential functions ranging from processing admissions to keeping campuses clean.

Like any good employer, universities should invest in their staff and make sure that they are paid fairly – and that must include the lowest paid staff. In recent years, students’ unions and trades unions have been running campaigns to make sure that all staff are paid at least the living wage (the real one, not George Osborne’s minimum wage hike) with varying degrees of success. Many of the lowest paid workers are staff working for contractors – often on low pay and poor conditions.

It is intolerable that any worker in a country as relatively wealthy as ours should receive poverty pay but it is particularly intolerable when staff in publicly funded institutions with well-paid senior management aren’t paid a wage that they can afford to live on – particularly when the wages of the highest paid continue to rise without serious justification.

As leaders of universities, vice-chancellors carry serious responsibilities for a large number of staff, huge budgets and a wide range of activity from research and innovation to educating students. It is right that our world-leading universities are able to attract and retain high performing leaders. But in recent years, university vice-chancellors have received almost continual inflation-busting increases in pay and conditions denied to many of their staff – including their lowest paid staff.

Excessive pay rises for those at the top of higher education institutions, coupled with low pay for many others, are demoralising for staff at a time when the UK increasingly needs to attract world class academics and support staff in order to function in an environment of higher tuition fees and international competition. It is also hard to justify when students are paying record levels of tuition fees. Decent pay for vice-chancellors is one thing, “fat cat” pay rises are another.

More must also be done to tackle the gender pay gap which exists at almost every level across the sector. According to the Times Higher Education pay survey, female academics are paid on average more than £5,000 less than their male counterparts. That is shameful and has got to change.

That’s why I’m proposing amendments to the Tory Higher Education Bill that would lead to greater transparency about levels of pay in our universities and a say for staff and students about salaries. Under these proposals, the governing body of a higher education provider would have to publish the ratio of pay between the highest, average and lowest paid employees at their institution. The governing body would also need to include staff and student representatives on any remuneration committee.

Why is this needed? Looking at the facts in the THE survey, one in ten universities paid their leaders 10 per cent more in 2014-15 than the previous year, while average staff pay rose by just two percent, with some universities also paying manual staff below £20,000. Will Hutton’s review of fair pay which reported in 2011, found that the “median vice-chancellor’s salary was 15.35 times the bottom of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association pay spine for university staff”. That’s why I’m also calling on every university to become an accredited living wage employer.

Remuneration committees decide how senior staff are to be rewarded, and it’s time that staff and student representatives were placed on those committees to create greater accountability in tackling excessive high pay and unacceptable low pay. Students and staff are not just consumers in the higher education sector, they are co-producers with an active interest in their institution’s direction – and they deserve to have their voices heard on this issue.

Just last year the University of East Anglia gave consideration to placing students on remuneration committees, recognising that doing so would recognise students as “crucial stakeholders” and “contribute to a robust and effective committee”. This is a welcome step which I hope they deliver on, but the sector should go further and introduce this at all universities – including staff.

I hope the Government will listen and give consideration to these important proposals. At a time when public money is scarce and students are paying record tuition fees, it is simply unacceptable that vice-chancellors continue to receive inflation-busting pay rises with seemingly little justification while the lowest paid staff have to exist on poverty pay.

Wes Streeting is MP for Ilford North and a member of the Treasury select committee and Higher Education and Research Bill committee.