The struggle for the future of NUS
Posted on September 11, 2007
Filed Under Inside NUS, News
In June 2007, the NUS leadership produced a “Green Paper” on “Governance Review”, taking its mandate from an interpretation of policy passed at annual conferences. A summary of the paper is available here. Read on for ENS’s response, including appendices on NUS finances and its culture of waste.
Contents
1. The background
2. The fight that’s needed
3. The culture of the movement
4. Defining things clearly
5. Summary
6. Nine positive proposals
Appendices
a. Review of NUS accounts, June 2007
b. NUS’s waste scandal, April 2006
To understand why the NUS leadership has published its “Green Paper” on “reform” of NUS structures, it is important to understand the political background.
Labour Students took control of NUS in 1982. Over the following 25 years they, or those politically close to them, have had the decisive say in how NUS has been run. These 25 years have been a disaster for students. We have lost battle after battle; the national union’s official leadership has repeatedly given in without a fight.
This period has seen the loss of Travel Grants, Special Equipment Grants, Minimum Grants, Older Students Allowances, the right to claim housing benefit, unemployment benefits and income support during holidays, the introduction of loans, the introduction of tuition fees, and the total abolition of grants - eventually reinstated on a heavily-means-tested basis, but only in order to sweeten the pill of differential top-up fees.
Average student debt is now roughly £15,000, according to the DfES, and continues to grow dramatically. Barclays Bank estimates that it could reach more than £30,000 by 2010.
Moreover the character of education has changed. From a certain vantage point it appears that the increased numbers of people in Higher Education is an opening up of education formerly reserved for the more privileged layers in society, to allow access to the majority.
In fact this ‘opening up’ is a political response to the needs of capital. Business requires more, somewhat better educated workers, and the education system has been reshaped to accommodate business. Capitalism forced this shift, its own interests, in its own way.
Only one aspect of the shifts inside education is to load vast debt on to students. Other aspects include: a “pack-’em-in and teach-’em-cheap” culture among many college managements; some dumbing down of educational standards; obsession with grades and exam results above learning as an enrichment of human life; the skewing of curricula, department funding and whole courses and institutions towards the needs of business.
The marketisation of education has brought more open representatives of business into the management of schools and FE colleges and has forced a ‘what’s-the-bottom-line?’ culture onto academia, which has corrupted academia. Worryingly, across education, the advance of business is marching in step with - or even being coupled with - the advance of religion.
We believe that NUS has a responsibility to fight ‘the battle of ideas’.
Student debt is important, but values in education are central too. We think the market should be forced back, out of education, and we believe the ideas which go with it - often almost uncontested - should be challenged.
Education must be free and secular. And education should be considered from the point of view of human need, controlled and run by the people who work in education and the people who use the system.
Which begs the question: how exactly should “human need” be ascertained?
The key to answering the question, “what sort of education do students want and need?”, is the self-organisation and democratic control of our education by those who work in education and those who use it. We need to conceive of our goal as a radical extension of democracy inside education: a battle for control of education “from below”.
Given this context and these goals, we should ask ourselves: how fit is our movement to wage this battle?
Our answer to this question is, in brief, that our movement is unprepared for, and the leadership unwilling to start, any such fight. The organisational changes we propose sit in this context and are designed to move towards an NUS better able to fight for living grants, campaign, take up political questions.
Conversely, we oppose any moves - and we strongly suspect that the Green Paper has been published precisely in order to prepare the way for such changes - that takes NUS further away from where we want to be, with a less-involved rank-and-file, and more control vested in managers and essentially unaccountable committees.
Over the past 25 years various aspects of “student union culture” have withered.
For example, at “civil society” level within student unions a great many political and campaign societies used to exist. It was common, back in 1982, to find enormous participation in various types of radical political discussion, debate and campaigning.
While sports and drama societies remain, what has often replaced or eclipsed the radical left is radical religion. In the early 80s, for example, Labour Clubs might have had several hundred members, many active in day-to-day campaigning and discussion. Today most Labour Clubs have ceased to exist; and most of those that remain have shrivelled radically.
In the past radical student activism often found its way through the (relatively open) official channels of the student union. SUs often held very regular general meetings that held their Execs to account and set priorities and made policy. This gave the individual membership entities of our national union a base among those committed to build student unions as organisations that paralleled trade unions: organisations that represented and fought for their members rights through mass involvement and mass control.
What has tended to replace the old ‘radical’ model is a culture of student unions as social, recreational and advice centres. SU Execs are - now - seldom subjected to democratic scrutiny by mass meetings and the pressure that such meetings can deliver on leaders.
The pressure that now exists on SU officers, however, comes from SU managers, senior staff in colleges and the general, corrosive, pro-business environment of today’s United Kingdom.
So we have many more officers who believe that their main objective is to re-furbish a first floor bar, or develop a new range of pasties, while students leave college in massive debt and the government’s education policies goes - effectively - unchallenged.
And this shift has gone a long with other changes which have made it harder for political and other minorities to organise on campus (high barriers for the setting up of societies, restrictions on leafleting, postering, holding meetings etc).
Many of the organisational features that accompanied the healthier, old culture, have gone too.
It is not only national demonstrations that have become fewer and smaller, and which have demanded less and less. But many local marches, protest weeks, pickets, meetings, campaign groups and networks existed ‘below’ the student union - these have largely gone too.
The local students’ union was a political hub. It often no longer is.
At local level many student bodies were bound together through Area NUS organisations. Areas allowed direct local support to be delivered to help the FE sector develop and campaign. Their disappearance was a political objective - given they often organised resistance to Labour. And their abolition has not only curtailed opposition to the leadership but isolated individual FE SUs and seriously reduced involvement in official NUS structures.
We often focus on the continual contraction of democracy within the national union by examining the structures (abolition of Winter conference; disappearance of much of the time formerly taken to hold our leadership to account; invention of a joke National Council etc). This is all necessary and true, but we feel that just as much attention needs to be paid to the ‘culture’ of NUS at every level and the ability of members to be involved.
How has this reduction of involvement come about? And how can it be reversed?
It is true that much of the problem lies outside NUS and our immediate control. The general decline of radicalism and militant trade unionism outside NUS has its roots in the defeats the labour movement suffered in the 1980s; we have been affected by the contradictory effects of the collapse of the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 and the great expansion of “globalised” capitalism currently underway.
That’s true, but NUS has done little to help itself. Why would ordinary students try to get involved in NUS if they can’t see it organising serious campaigns and never see it winning? This is a national student union, let us remember, that in 1996-7, actively supported the abolition of student grants, cancelled all its national demonstrations and attacked student unions that organised tuition fee non-payment campaigns. A national union that, even once the left had forced it to renew its support for grants, continued to cancel national demonstrations and diminish its campaigning activity at crucial moments - in late 2003, for instance, just before the government won its five vote Parliamentary majority for top-up fees in early 2004. Or, to take an other example, a union that actively supports New Labour’s Further Education Bill, which promotes privatisation in the FE sector.
Moreover, why would students try to get involved in NUS if “being involved” had to mean pushing through layer upon layer of bureaucratic barrier deliberately created to stop such people being “involved”, holding their leaders to account or shaping policy?
This brings into question the whole nature of NUS democracy. So, for example, NUS conference still has many delegates, but how connected is NUS to its membership if those delegates have been elected by small proportions of college populations with little or no debate as to what’s at stake inside NUS?
The current Green Paper is a seemingly bland document. “Governance” is presented as a dry and “technical” matter. The authors say they will publish an “objective review”. The reality is different.
We think that organisational changes that political people propose are generally shaped by their politics. The difference between us and the authors of the “Green Paper” is that we are open about our politics and are eager to explain the link between our vision of what NUS should be, and the organisational shifts we suggest or oppose.
The Green Paper’s authors are currently hiding their politics - and their firm proposals - behind “technocratic”, “objective” generalities. Thus the “Green Paper” demands “liberation campaigning and autonomy”….”effective and efficient decision making”… “effective use of resources”.
On a certain level who could object to the “effective use of resources”? (No, we are for the ineffective use of resources!) But on closer examination one person’s “effective use of resources” might be spending £25,000 on a high-profile campaign against fees, and another person’s “effective use of resources” would be spending the same money on a glossy “launch” with white wine and tiger prawns. (This is a real example: see Appendix B.)
One person’s “effective and efficient decision making” might be chopping time off conference and centralising power - while another person’s “effective and efficient decision making” might look messy and take longer but involve more people and be “efficient” in the sense that the membership have control.
These bland phrases appear straightforward, but in fact have political content!
The President has appointed a review body. No doubt the President’s appointees have been selected according to political criterion (i.e. overall, the committee will have a majority which will come up with conclusions she agrees with).
Unsurprisingly, no left-winger from NUS National Executive Committee has been appointed among only three NEC representatives on the committee. The two student union officers are both friends of the leadership.
On the other hand a representative from AMSU (the SU managers’ association), and an SU manager from Leeds University have been co-opted. (As has a representative of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.) What are these people doing on our committees?! Let’s have an end to the interference by managers in the affairs of our unions!
Of course the rider is added, without any apparent irony: “It must be stressed that the idea of the group is that it is not in any way representative [!!], but that it has skills and knowledge to carry out the mandate” (Progressing the NUS Governance Review, 30 April 07). Again, “reform” is presented as an organisational, apolitical matter which is capable of a technical fix.
A £100,000 consultancy has been employed to tell us what we need. (Sofie Buckland of ENS was the only vote against this on the NEC.) Such people - inevitably - are not radicals. And, again, consultants are generally picked to come up with a particular series of answers, known in advance. Their job is the detail of the matter already decided. If they offer ‘options’, their ‘options’ will sit within a conservative, pre-decided framework.
We do not expect to see an “option” presented for a mass, campaigning, political, radical NUS with power devolved and central management power curtailed through constitutional changes, transparency and wage cuts for senior staff.
So this £100,000 in consultants’ fees would be better spent elsewhere.
Our movement is perfectly able to decide what we need following open and democratic internal debate.
If a review committee is needed it would be far better that the NEC itself take on the role - at least it was elected!
We think the review body and consultancy will report and demand changes, dressed up in “objective” language which will amount to a further attack on NUS democracy, i.e. on the ability of NUS’s membership to set policy directions, hold its leaders to account and to conduct the sort of militant campaigning that NUS should really be about.
We expect, instead, to see proposals which will further limit conference’s powers, limit political pluralism at NUS’s centre, cut funding for “off message” sectors, centralise power in senior national sabbatical/management hands.
We expect proposals for an expanded National Council - a well-known joke entity - which would meet a few times a year and contain only token “political diversity”, but rest on a layer of right-wing HE sabbatical officers accountable to themselves and their bar managers.
We will end up - if these changes go unchallenged and are not stopped - with an NUS even less able to fight for students’ interests than the NUS we currently have.
And, we predict, if these type of changes go through these “reforms” will not be the end - any more than the last round of cuts to NUS conference in 2004/5, or the limitation of funding for part-time NEC members last year in 2006/7, were. The NUS right - openly right wing, anti-campaigning - will take heart and move further against democracy.
The context of the “Green Paper” is nearly thirty years of defeat and retreat by NUS. We don’t need more of the same - further centralisation, contraction of democracy, political retreat. We need a new path.
There is a real “democratic deficit”, but it is us, the left, not mainstream leaders, who want to address it.
This is not a consultation but preparation for an attack on NUS democracy - a curtailment in the ability of the membership to set priorities and hold their leadership to account.
The review body is undemocratically - laughably - constituted. Spending £100,000 on a consultant is absurd.
1. Abolish the “Governance Review”, claw back all costs it is still possible to claw back and conduct a democratic debate in the NEC and at national conference on proposals for reform.
2. Begin a process of cutting bureaucratic waste and redirect resources towards positive campaigning. (See Appendices for some ideas on this.)
3. Reform NUS “Staff Protocol” so that it is not used to shield top managers from accountability. The NEC should be able to set a framework for such people’s employment. Set a maximum NUS salary of something like £30-35,000 a year. (The national average wage is less than £25,000.)
4. Restore Winter Conference and/or lengthen existing conference to allow more discussion and accountability.
5. Restore cuts to delegation entitlement made in 2004.
6. Maintain the “Block of 12″ as a guarantee of diversity, pluralism and accountability at the top of NUS.
7. The NEC should meet much more regularly with a set time-table of meetings at least once a month. Without this, the Management Team, together with unelected staff, becomes the real executive power in NUS.
8. Reform of Regional arrangements; restore Area NUS organisations.
9. Support staff for Liberation Campaigns - tackling disparities should mean increased funding for e.g. the Disabled Students Campaign, not cutting it for the Women’s Campaign.
Appendices: NUS’s culture of waste
Appendix A: Analysis of NUS accounts, June 2007
The following analysis of NUS’s accounts was written with the advice of a professor of accountancy at Sheffield Hallam University in June 2007. It made use of three documents:
1. Estimates of Income and Expenditure
2. Finance Committee Report
3. Draft Consolidated Group Financial Statements (year ended 30 June 2006)
(All page refs are to the PDF files on the NUS website.)
i) Cutting the cost of annual conference
P158 of the Finance Committee report raises the issue of cutting the costs of NUS annual conference. The Finance Committee says that it is committed to capping/cutting the costs of organising the conference. They have submitted motions trying to reduce the conference to one delegate per Constituent Member (rejected) and to reduce it to two delegates per CM with one place guaranteed for women (also rejected). It doesn’t need to be explained how ludicrously undemocratic this would be, essentially limiting representation to sabbatical officers; it would also guarantee the almost total domination of conference by the various right-wing factions.
Now, it is true that conference is expensive: in 2006 it cost £328,000 out of NUS’s total £5.5 million, up from £100,000 in 2005. (It would be interesting to know exactly how this growth has taken place, since in 2004 the size and length of NUS conference were cut back considerably.) However, this figure pales in comparison to some other expenditure. For instance, in 2006 “fundraising and marketing” expenditure was £1 million, up from £291,000 in 2005!
This has not been a very efficient use of resources: in the same period, NUS’s “membership income” increased by just £400,000. Associate Card income rose from £84,000 to £310,000, but that is still a loss. (See below for figures on the enormous loss made by the NUS Extra Card.)
This is even more ridiculous when you consider that NUS could have won new affiliations/larger contributions from existing affiliates by actually running a high profile, active campaign on, well, pretty much anything. Instead it has spent hundreds of thousands of new money on marketing, with very little effect.
Or take another item: £191,000 on “leasehold improvements”. Perhaps NUS needed new computers for its new premises, or something similar, but again this is a very large expenditure indeed.
Last year, ENS produced a statement detailing roughly £100,000 of waste in NUS (see below) - in the same period when the national education funding demonstration had been cancelled. The situation has no doubt been similar this year. (Note one crucial aspect of this: we are still, due to the misuse of staff protocol to protect bureaucracy and deny conference and/or the NEC to right to make officials accountable, not allowed to know how much top NUS officials are paid.) If Finance Committee genuinely want to cut wasteful spending, rather than attacking NUS democracy, in other words, there are much better places for them to look than the costs of conference - a mere £330,000 out of £5.5 million, and this after the size and length of conference has already been cut substantially (in 2004/5).
ii) NUS Extra and Associate cards
On p46 of the 2007 conference document “Estimates of Income and Expenditure”, after all the waffle about how great and “transparent” Finance Committee is, there are all the facts about how abysmally badly NUS Extra and Associate Cards are doing. (NB It is also worth noting that the free NUS Democracy Cards will cost £76K in 07/08, but a lot of students won't be able to use the nusonline services that come with it: “If your union issues a local college or union card, unfortunately you will not be able to register with nusonline but you will have access to all other opportunities to participate in your union’s and NUS democractic structures as well as the opportunity to browse the open areas of nusonline.co.uk,” says the NUS website.)
The predictions on how NUS Extra is supposed to perform are kept separate from the data on how Extra has already done - presumably in order to obscure the massive and unrealistic jump in revenue that NUS is predicting. The following is a table of actual income from Extra/Associate Cards in 05/06 and projected income in 06/07 and 07/08:
| PREDICTION 07/08 | PREDICTION 06/07 | ACTUAL 05/06 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extra revenue | 1,578,500 | 1,127,500 | 199,752 |
| Associate revenue | 368,000 | 455,180 | 310,955 |
| Total Profit/(Loss) | 184,694 | (21,000) | c (47,000) |
Thus if NUS Extra somehow makes an extra £1 million in 06/07, and Associate Cards make an extra £150,000, then they’ll still make a loss of £21,000. Then another large leap of £450,000 will be necessary in order to make a profit of only £184,000. Given that NUS predicted a prophet in the first year, it’s hardly difficult to imagine that it will continue to make a loss. So, after moving towards individualised membership and alienating thousands of students from NUS, the prospects for actually raising significant revenue out of the Extra project look bleak.
iii) Making savings
To contextualise these figures, in 2006/07 the £21K loss expected from the cards will form part of a projected £1.1m overall deficit for the union. In 2007/08, when the cards will supposedly start paying for themselves to the tune of £184,694, NUS will be running an overall deficit of 647,000.
But then something very odd is supposed to happen in the financial year 07/08. Although an overall deficit of £647, 067 is projected, the Senior Management Team have set themselves a target of making £347,067 of savings by April 2007. Nowhere in the Estimates of Income and Expenditure is it made clear how these massive savings are going to be achieved. Are they going to scrap conference? Are they all going to kill elderly relatives and donate their inheritance? Who knows? They don't appear to: or if they do know, they obviously don't want to tell us. Anyway, Senior Management Team have given their word of honour that they will cut the deficit by the probably arbitrary figure of £347,000, so we can rest easy - the deficit will, in fact, only be £300K.
It's interesting to note that they planned these predicted savings in time to announce them at conference. However it says on p21 of the Estimates that they will not explain where this money is meant to come from until Summer Council. It could be that there is a perfectly rational and reasonable explanation for this. Or it could be that they wanted to parade their prudence and fiscal skill at conference, reap the political benefits of this, and then announce quietly at Summer Council that their plans for achieving these promised £347K of savings are all bollocks - or involve cuts that they did not want debated at conference.
Appendix B: From April 2006: NUS’s £100,000 waste scandal
Also available here.
Over the last two years, one aspect of the right-wing consensus which dominates the National Union of Students has been support for money-saving “reforms ”. The “reforms ” have been anti-democratic through and through: cutting the size and length of National Conference, slashing the travel budget of part-time National Executive Committee members and, outrageously, cancelling NUS's national education funding demonstration this year. Some more radical “reformers ” want to go further, for instance by abolishing the part-time section of the NEC entirely - as has been proposed by some motions and amendments to this conference.
Yet it is these same “reformers ” who have presided over an obscene spending scandal during the past year.
- £20,000 for the Priority Campaigns Launch, at which delegates enjoyed breaded tiger prawns and white wine while listening to Bill Rammell - the man responsible, as Higher Education Minister, for carrying out the Government's attacks on students. This was 25% of the entire campaigns budget.
- £14,000 for an “Inquiry ” into anti-semitism conducted by “human resources consultant ” Marco Henry. Investigating the growth of anti-semitism in the student movement is important, but why are we paying an unelected and unaccountable management consultant thousands of pounds to do it?
- £50,000 for MORI to conduct research into. . .NUS reform!
- At least £2,500 non-recoverable spending for the National Student Learner Programme, a series of elaborately organised but totally apolitical training days designed to impart skills such as how to use a flipchart to SU sabbaticals.
- At least £50,000 (we're not allowed to know the figure) a year for the salary of the NUS National Director. Even if you think that this position is useful and should continue to exist, £35,000 is a perfectly generous salary (the average - mean - wage is roughly £24,000, and this figure is distorted by very high “remuneration ” for a few people at the top of the scale). So that's £15,000 of wasted spending at the very least.
These items alone contain around £100,000 of wasted spending. There can be little doubt that the NUS budget contains a great deal more waste in other areas. Even using a high estimate of how much a national demonstration might cost, £100,000 is two demonstrations' worth. Using a more reasonable estimate, it is enough for FOUR demonstrations. The money could also be used to restore the cuts made to National Conference, restore NEC travel budgets and/or provide full-time staff for each of the Liberation Campaigns.
The right in NUS says that we need to save money, but it has no intention of cutting bureaucracy and glitzy fripperies. ENS wants the opposite - less money for bureaucracy and more for democratic representation and campaigning. We want a total shake up of what NUS spends its money on. The “reformers ” present themselves as non-political, disinterested “independents ”, whose concern for NUS is somehow above politics. In fact they represent a classic right-wing hostility to NUS actually doing any campaigning.
When ENS opposed the decision to cancel the national demonstration, we did so on an explicitly political basis - because we believe that the purpose of a union is to fight aggressively for its members' interests. Those engineered the demo's cancellation hid behind financial arguments rather than being honest and up-front about their opposition to militant campaigning. Now it is clearer than ever that those financial arguments were nonsense.
Everyone wants to “save the union ”, but slashing NUS's democracy and campaigning undermines the entire purpose of having a national union. If the “reformers ” continue to hold sway, there will eventually be nothing left to save. ENS will continue to fight for a total overhaul of NUS finances so that its money is spent on representing and campaigning for students, not bureaucratic nonsense that effects no one but the NUS elite.
