As someone who was involved the campaign to implement the London Living Wage at UEL I read with the dismay your announcement of the decision to outsource security staff at UEL. During the campaign we made a strong recommendation to the VCG to take the cleaning staff back in house. This was the only guarantee, we argued, that the University, could meet its ethical obligations to its employees (direct and indirect) and deliver on its stated aims in the Transformation for Excellence document on the development of an excellent workforce. In making this recommendation we also drew on the experience of Queen Mary University which took its cleaning staff back in house in 2008 and saw both a reduction in costs and improvement in the quality of the service.
For this reason I am sceptical, along with many of my colleagues, about the claims in your announcement that outsourcing will lead to an improvement in the quality of the service. What evidence do you have for this claim? How do you respond to the widely held belief across all constituencies in the university that this is a short term cost-cutting measure? Finally have you conducted a risk assessment of this proposal? The latter would be articularly important in the run up to the Olympics.