A government appointee to the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) board is firing and rehiring hundreds of workers, despite Labour’s pledge to abolish the controversial practice.

Coventry university vice chancellor Professor John Latham was named as a non-executive director of the DBT on 17 December, only five days after the university announced swingeing job cuts. The cuts, which are now subject to consultation, would see 92 full-time members of staff made redundant, with a further 200 staff transferred onto a subsidiary company called the Peoples Future Limited (PFL).

While at-risk staff described the timing of his appointment as a “kick in the teeth,” Latham said he was “honoured” to be appointed to the role, and that he had “developed considerable expertise to help scrutinise and advise government policy.” He will sit on the board for three years, and offer advice, support and scrutiny on the department’s work.

Included in the department’s work is the task of overseeing Labour’s flagship employment bill, unveiled on October 10, which among other pledges seeks to clampdown on the use of fire and rehire.

The UCU said it was “dismayed” by the appointment, with regional official Anne O’Sullivan saying that Latham should “focus on getting his own house in order before taking on additional roles for the government.”

James Harrison, director of the Institute of Employment Rights, said: “It looks like the ironically named ‘People’s Future Limited’ are only going to be looking after people that are their shareholders. It seems the biggest driver of this apparent fire and rehire, is to rob workers of their pay, pensions (deferred pay), terms, and conditions.

“This hawkish behaviour by the university only points to the need to tighten up the government’s bill to properly ban fire and rehire. This deterrent would ensure that outsourcing is not an attractive option for any rogue employer seeking to profit from a race to the bottom on workers’ rights.”

Last November, the government university watchdog appointed a team of insolvency specialists amidst growing concerns about the financial future of a number of higher education institutions. Among the universities struggling is Coventry, with its 2023 financial report stating that income was £85m less than what had been forecasted. The university has said it needs to make £100m in cuts between 2023 to 2025.

Ironically given the state of the university’s finances, Latham has also been appointed to chair the government’s audit and risk assurance committee. “This is a guy who has presided over a deficit,” said an academic at Coventry who asked not to be named while the consultation is open. “Yet he’s presenting himself as a financial whiz.” Staff also pointed out that the same year the deficit was announced, Latham received an £80,768 bonus on top of his £312,617 salary.

The academic said this was a “calculated” attack on staff “in order to give us worse terms for the work that we’re already doing.”

“The litmus test is: will the students see a difference between us now and us when we’re on these new contracts?” they said. “And they’re not going to see any difference. Coventry keeps saying these jobs are different, but they’re not to the students. It’s really galling.”

The departments affected include the school of economics, finance and accounting, the college of arts and society, and in engineering. However, those currently unaffected by the redundancies report feeling far from safe. “We’ve all just been waiting for when it will affect us,” said the academic. “It’s going to affect everyone. It’s really disturbing.”

Staff transferred over to PFL would no longer technically be employed by Coventry, despite the subsidiary being entirely owned by the university. Terms and conditions for staff employed by PFL are inferior. The new contract increases working hours, reduces the days of annual leave, and removes staff from the National Framework Agreement, a pay scale negotiated by the UCU.

Unlike Coventry University, UCU is not recognised by the subsidiary, meaning the union would not be able to represent staff in negotiations with the university. The union called this an attempt to “derecognise the union by the back door.”

Like many universities, Coventry has become increasingly reliant on the recruitment of international students, who unlike UK students don’t have capped fees. However, visa restrictions brought in last year by the Conservatives have resulted in a sharp drop in the number of international students applying to UK institutions.

Coventry spent almost £55m in 2023 on fees to agents overseeing the recruitment of overseas students in. Grady said that the university had “bet big on ever increasing international student numbers,” and now was making staff “pay the price for its failures.”

The new contract removes staff from the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, which post-92 universities are required to place academic staff onto, and puts them instead on a less generous Aviva pension. Under the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, employer contributions are set at 28.68%. UCU general secretary Jo Grady accused Coventry of “leaving industry standard schemes by the back door.”

“We really care about our students and want to give them a good experience,” said the academic. “If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be changing the reading material that we prepare every year, giving students interesting stuff to look at, or trying to come up with interesting ways of making complicated topics accessible. That’s why we work as hard as we do.”

The minister for employment rights, Justin Madders, declined to give a comment.

A Coventry University Group pointed to the challenging outlook for the entire higher education sector, caused by “a new financial reality created by Brexit, a seven-year freeze in UK tuition fees, unsustainable pensions and the devastating impact of the previous government’s policy U-turn on international students, none of which we can control.”

“We have successfully grown student numbers in Coventry over a number of years and have been proud to create a large number of jobs as a result but we must rebalance our student-staff ratios in line with current student numbers.

“We have proposed a reduction of 92 FTE academic posts from the three colleges that sit within Coventry University, and we are now consulting with colleagues before making any final decisions.”