Errors surface in Imperial’s salary benchmarks
The College will not return to the negotiating table in spite of errors made by consultant.
Imperial has said that the benchmarking it uses to determine the pay for academic staff contained errors, going back to 2021. The errors “resulted in the under-estimation of the base salaries for comparator institutions at both Lecturer and Senior Lecturer levels,” according to the Imperial benchmarking webpage, which now shows corrected values.
These flaws were revealed after the Imperial branch of University and College Union (UCU), a higher education trade union, identified a likely error in the latest figures, where Imperial lecturers were shown to earn around one and half times the median salary of their counterparts in London Russel Group (LRG) universities (UCL, King’s College, LSE, and Queen Mary).
“Last week, prompted by JTU questions, senior management admitted they had massively exaggerated our standing in these benchmarks, having not noticed an error of over 30% in some categories,” an article posted by the UCU on 7th October reads.
During the “In Conversation with the President and Provost” event on Wednesday 22nd October, Provost Peter Haynes called the error “highly regrettable”.
Haynes explained that the benchmarking exercise has been performed by the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association (UCEA) since 2021, when they took over from a previous consultant.
“At that stage, [UCEA] made an error when they mapped Imperial’s academic grades – lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader – across to national grades that they were using in their benchmarking,” Haynes explained during the webinar. “They didn’t share they methodology with us at the time, and the error was not spotted until this year, at which point we were very prompt in trying to hunt down the source of this error with UCEA.”
In an email to Imperial, a representative for UCEA wrote: “I would like to apologise to you and your colleagues for the error and resulting confusion … To ensure we maintain our usual high-quality service in the future, UCEA is conducting a comprehensive review of our benchmarking products, protocols and processes.”
While the JTU “urgently requested a return” to the pay negotiations, “particularly in the light of these shortcomings,” President Brady said that the error would not change the College management’s stance: “Actually, we came to the conclusion that … it was not so flawed that it would change our offer, and hence we are not reopening the negotiations.”
In an email to the Imperial heads of departments dated 6th October, Haynes confirmed that the error had not “materially changed” the College management’s stance, although management clarified in a later email “at no point in our communications have we stated or implied that the issue is immaterial.”
Haynes also noted that the median pay for lecturers and senior lecturers remained above upper-quartile pay for LRG, standing 18.1% and 5.8% higher, respectively.
While the error does not affect the salaries of professors, the UCU also deplored a decline in relative pay for Imperial professors. The relative pay of professors climbed when Imperial left the national pay bargaining system in 2005 and peaked in 2014, when it was over 18% higher than the LRG STEM median (medicine excluded), according to a UCU graph. This year, Imperial’s benchmark shows that professors are paid 3.7% above the median of comparators.
“Imperial would not be happy if it sat in the middle of the London Russell Group in terms of performance,” Professor Tom Pike, the Vice-President of Imperial College UCU, told Felix. He questioned the discrepancy between the university’s objectives for pay and performance, noting that universities like UCL had schemes allowing higher salary increases than those resulting from national bargaining settlements.
