Union reports increase in racist incidents at Lancaster University

And they say they have failed to see improvements despite raising the issue with management three years ago.

A recent internal faculty-level report found that 27 per cent of all staff had witnessed or experienced institutional racism, 30 per cent of non-White respondents had directly experienced interpersonal racism in this setting, and there was an average BAME student award gap of 22.4 per cent over the previous five years.

LUCU – part of the largest union of academic and professional services staff in the Higher and Further Education sectors in the UK – believes that since 2019 when they first raised the issue of race equality with senior management, there have been at least 40 reported cases of direct racism and racist hate speech.

At least four cases have since been reported to the police.

LUCU has written to the chair of Lancaster University Council, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Alistair Burt, urging the university to institute an independent and external enquiry into the institution’s processes and procedures to deal with race equality.

However, the union says that instead of a willingness to collaboratively tackle the issue, LUCU has faced "obfuscation and obstacles at every step" including university senior management terminating a joint working agreement "under a pretext that the partnership is not working".

LUCU president Sunil Banga and equality officer Julie Hearn, on behalf of Lancaster University UCU, said: "It is clear from a national regulation and governance perspective that there are responsibility gaps in tackling inequality in Higher Education."

A university spokesman said: "Racism is real, unjust and entirely unacceptable and like many other universities, we have proactively implemented a number of policies and initiatives to reflect our true community values and to support every single member of our university.

"However, if one person claims to have experienced racism on our campus then this is unacceptable and we will redouble our efforts in response.

"We offer our heartfelt apologies to anyone in that position and strongly encourage our community to report incidents either through the student conduct officer or anonymously via the Unisafe app, via staff processes or to the police.

"Where incidents are reported to us we will act and we will learn and improve. To this end, we are in the process of bringing in external consultants to work with staff and students to ensure that our policies in relation to harassment and bullying, and their implementation, reflect best practice.

"We aspire to be an inclusive community where all of our members are treated with dignity and respect. Anyone experiencing racism on campus will receive our full support."

The spokesman added that following a period of review between the university and trade unions of the partnership agreement, Lancaster University has written to its recognised trade unions to give six months’ notice of withdrawal from the agreement.

The spokesman said that UCU and the university have both confirmed that they do not consider that the existing agreement works in the way originally intended and as such, the university does not consider it is appropriate to keep working with this agreement.

A series of workshops were held to identify issues and improvements to the agreement with limited progress being made and a further workshop with ACAS had been scheduled for June to help make progress, but the university was notified that the trade unions would not be participating in that meeting.

The spokesman added: "The university leadership team look forward to improved partnership working with campus unions in the future focused on helping improve the quality of working life for all employees.

"The partnership agreement will continue to operate under its current terms until December 2022 and work to establish the new ways of engagement thereafter during the next term."