FOI_25-167 Staff severance

Date of response: 01 July 2025

We have now considered your request of 03 June 2025 for the following information:

I am seeking aggregate data relating to staff departures from your university under severance or redundancy schemes over the academic years 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25 (to date).

I would appreciate the following information for each year:

Question 1. Total number of staff who left the university under:

o Voluntary severance (including voluntary redundancy schemes)

o Compulsory severance (including compulsory redundancy)

o Other staff exits related to restructuring, if recorded separately

Question 2. A breakdown of these figures by:

o Staff category (e.g. academic, professional services, technical, senior leadership)

o Age range (e.g. under 30, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60+)

o Contract type (e.g. permanent, fixed-term)

Question 3. Any associated documentation outlining the criteria or rationale used to determine eligibility for these schemes.

Please provide the data in a spreadsheet or tabular format if possible.

Our response:

Please see accompanying document, our ref: FOI_25-167 Appendix A.

Information not held - s.1(1)(a), Freedom of Information Act

On this occasion it is not possible to provide all of the requested information. In line with your rights under section 1(1)(a) of the Act to be informed whether information is held, we confirm that the University does not hold any recorded information for other staff exits related to restructuring. The University does not record these separately, therefore these figures are included in the figures for voluntary and compulsory severance.

Values marked fewer than five <5: Section 40 (2) exemption explanation:

On this occasion, it is not possible to provide all the requested information. The Act contains several exemptions that allow public authorities to withhold certain information from release. We have applied the following exemption to part of your request.

We can confirm that the University does hold this data and we believe that the requested information, constitutes the personal data of individuals, as defined by Article 4(1) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.

We believe that disclosure this data would be contrary to the requirements of Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR; namely that information must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. These individuals would have no expectation that this information would be made publicly available, and we have not identified a lawful basis that would allow or require us to disclose this information. To ensure that we do not inadvertently release personal data in this response or in combination with other publicly available data, we have replaced all values between 0 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.