UKH

I came across the Mutually Agreed Resignation Schemes (MARS) for the first time today and after a few searches I can see the TUC and several unions are worried about its use to bypass legal requirements in redundancy processes in restructures (including there being a shared financial rationalle for negotiation with recognised trade unions and required processes, for example to avoid discrimination).

Simply it offers individual staff in a designated group the right to resign for a settlement similar to a redundancy.

Does anyone in the UKC hive mind have any information on where this came from and any general legal assessment of risks (to staff and organisations) or any political response.

It's already being used in a number of Universities and Colleges and is on various Council and NHS Trust's policy websites.

MARS? Judging by the lack of replies, looks like it’s not an interesting topic…

Or that UKC has no users that are HR managers and has for once been left stumped by a question? Can't say as I've heard of it. 

Not even a wispa ?  

Important enough to get included in TUC motions 

https://congress.tuc.org.uk/motion-23-opposing-fire-and-rehire-an-industria...

... caused real problems for staff in Wolverhampton Uni last year...

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/education/2022/06/08/union-members-fear...

....and rumours of severel other Uni's this year....

NHS schemes are slightly less aggressive but they say they have treasury approval:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Guidance-on-mutually-...

.....if these schemes are seen to work they will spread rapidly, especially in the public sector.

It all very much looks like Voluntary Redundancy "Lite", as in employers can set their own conditions and timescales.

And of course it's what any individual can agree with their employer, but done en masse.

So if implemented reasonably, I can't see an issue. But of course what's happening is it being implemented unreasonably in a way that pressurises people.

Unfortunately, many organisations, when faced with a financial crisis, lose all semblance of sensible planning, communication, etc, etc and just become fixated on reducing operating costs.

The reduction may be necessary for an organisation's survival (although what does that say about their insufficient strategic planning), but there are good ways of going about this (communication, involve everyone in the "journey" so that everyone understands why, what and how), and bad ways of going about this (the easy way out).

Apols for my poor attempt at humour, but at least it’s given your topic of Mars a boost. 

It's nothing new. Compulsory redundancies were avoided at one place I worked when such offers were made. If the offer is decent, why not?

I nearly always appreciate your bounty even twix't over-enthusiastic fudge on the Saudi payday. I wish it twirl bar-none but we are all in the butter finger club some time out there.

If you "voluntarily" resign, rather than being made redundant, does this affect the degree of support you're entitled to whilst looking for your next job?

I would ask in return why avoid voluntary redundancy offers with the protection they offer for staff and the organisation. Michael explained some of the issues above. In my experience some departmental restructures were possible without cost savings from staff departures once the financial position was shared with staff and the unions and shown to be in error or easily fixable by other action. In some others the justification only existed for a brief period and expensive negotiated departures had to be replaced in a year. Occasionally there was deliberate discrimination despite management cliams of equality assessments (according to subsequent employment tribunals).  

It probably removes the need for statutory support that a good employer could chose to undertake anyway. However, so far, the evidence I've seen isn't strong that this is a common route to choose at scale for public sector organisations demonstrating good practice.

Looks like a way to fast forward to the outcome without all the delays of consultation etc. 

Edit: and with the option to add additional strings and caveats like waiving rights to future claims, which is a bit sketchy https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/10600-birmingham-counci...

It doesn't look like it's one of those things that's necessarily bad in all cases, could even be better in some, but that's how zero hours contracts looked before they became widespread so it does seem potentially ominous and I understand your concerns. It doesn't seem to be something an employer could force staff into but then it's naive to assume coercion is never on the table.

Edit again: conversely I don't see how you could effectively ban this as a practice. Offering someone money to quit would be a difficult thing to legislate against without severe unintended consequences.

Speed, certainty and avoidance of bureaucracy.  For staff "If you agree you will get £xxx by this date and leave", rather than "if you put your name forward you might get £yyy possibly by this date if you are chosen and if there isn't some change of plan beforehand".  For the organisation they will know within a few weeks what the situation is, avoid months of wrangling and argument, bad-blood and demotivation of many staff who ultimately may not be affected.

Obviously if done badly or in bad faith the above won't apply, but that's true of any process.

Getting chocolate-based humour will never work for some folks. It'll always be a marathon for them.

In certain aspects UK law is quite sensible, with the principle that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably a duck. Given that, I wonder whether these schemes have actually been tested in court? You could certainly imagine a judge deciding that this is redundancy in all but name, and so granting the same rights to employees.

It might be true in any process but some processes actively protect staff and the organisation (and actively prevent discrimination) and others don't.  Such bureaucracy wouldn't exist without a rationale.

Most University professional jobs involved a trade-off of extra years training and initial job insecurity and lower pay for vocational satisfaction and better long term job stability. Universities are one of the biggest export earners in the UK and Universities UK claim this boosts the UK economy by about 42 billion. Unfortunately government undergraduate funding makes a loss and the Universities collectively won't push back enough on the need to change that, so, unfortunately, many are struggling and are looking desperately to cut costs. The problem with such cost cutting is we risk losing the goose that lays golden eggs by not feeding it properly and leaving the door open to greener pastures. I've seen restructure decisions altered or reversed during redundancy negotiations, when the implications for losses from much reduced overseas student recruitment were pointed out.

https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/latest/news/international-students-boost-u...

The same pressures apply elsewhere in the public sector, especially to some cash-strapped Councils and NHS trusts.

Such change is glacial. Tribunals are taking around two years to produce reports on significant test cases that castigate bad actors. Most of the worst VCs will have retired before it impacts them.

The worst NHS examples like understaffed maternity units where, despite early warnings, we ended up with hundreds of avoidable deaths, took decades to publicly expose and start to fix.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-60925959

The public are being taken for a ride and we need significant improvements in public sector governance.

That will depend on the situation.  The case I mentioned above it certainly worked out well for all involved.

Maybe true or not but  largely irrelevant to whether offering staff a good deal to leave is wise.

I smell a rat in your anecdote... never seen or heard of any major restructure that would normally require a formal redundancy process that left everyone happy. I have seen quite a bit of good early consultation and union, staff and mangement working together well that resolved situations very quickly and with relatively minimal upset, on a voluntary basis. I've already mentioned bad plans that were changed or altered thanks to formal redundancy process protections. Any redundancy process that I've worked on (thousands of academics over the years) only a few compulsory redundancies were made and of those any that was challenged on the tribunal route was won or paid off and all those would have been much cheaper for the Uni to avoid.

Alongside that tens of millions go into individual gagged settlements in the sector every year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47936662

Oh that's right. I'm making it up.

FFS it's pretty clear why you spent your career at loggerheads with absolutely everyone.

Au contraire,  such negotiation is about practical problem solving with inevitable compromises and extra risks of people suffering attached to failure, it's part of why I had better working relationships with most senior management and HR than most of my TU colleagues (some of whom only ever disagreed and got angry with anything they did); internet discussions are very different and for everyone like you that I've 'sparred' with many times on ideas here, I have several of emails and comments face-to-face, in support of what I say.

You have a history on UKC of strong disagreement with me on even pragmatic trade union positions in academia so I see you as a lost cause on agreement on the subject and very much an outlier in that as an academic, still a useful foil for debate and highlighting issues.

If you genuinlly want to be more constructive, explain what happened in more detail including why you definitely know everyone was happy (as that has never happened in my wide experience). We both might learn more then.

Does a MARS settlement have the same tax advantages as redundancy?

Seems to be the same first 30k tax free. I did wonder if that might cause some tax investigations given how badly some of these disputes in Universities seem to have gone. In one case I know about now, local UCU members are relying on referrals for individual financial advice (which has a resource cost if MARS schemes become more widespread).

There are obvious potential pension, NI and other contractual issues, especially around breaks in service, that seem more of a risk for MARS than a formal redundancy process.

I'd love to see some broader legal views on this and was surprised not to easily find some given some related disputes are over a year old.

I would have thought it obviated any statutory requirement for consultation.  Or is it "constructive redundancy" if such a thing exists?

Presumably it is also on your record that you resigned and might affect any statutory information returns on the subject that the employer has to make in the event of redundancy

I was more thinking about things like Jobseekers Allowance and other benefits. If you've made yourself unemployed (ie. you resigned) I thought you were not eligible for certain benefits you would otherwise have received if you'd been made redundant/sacked etc.?

Sounds like a way to make redundancies without the employer having to meet the conditions for redundancy or support the requirements of a redundancy programme. Having said that, pretty sure people will opt for it if they want to leave. Note that informal settlements already exist, e.g. in engineering where it's typical to get 2 months salary as pay off when a project finishes.

If you genuinely want to be constructive, perhaps don't call me a liar? 

It was pretty simple - a department over-expanded and needed to get rid of 6(?) academics.  The Head knocked on likely  doors and made generous offers if taken up in a couple of weeks.  Sufficient accepted.  No further upheaval, no compulsory redundancies, no doubt and waiting over a voluntary process.  Of those who went, one started a consultancy that (having just checked) is still going 15 years later, a couple retired early.    You are right the usual union mal-contents harrumphed for a week but they then went back to their usual obsessions.

I was talking about bigger restructures under MARS, that I thought should really involve formal redundancy consultation at departmental, school or college level, like Wolverhampton. In the NHS rules I linked above it looks like using MARS in such redundancy situations is explicitly excluded (clearly not so elsewhere).

A restructure removing 6 staff from a department would have been breaching negotiated university rules, so no surprise trade unions would have concerns ... it would never have got past me. However, I'm aware that such situations, especially in small teams, often 'slip between cracks' in the trade union consultation requirement: 20 posts in a Uni in a 90 day period (it's rare any University could strictly speaking ever avoid that). Given it's 15 plus years ago they would formally have been voluntary redundacies or individual severance payments of some type, not MARS agreements.

Small numbers taking local departmental 'deals' can end up being conned into accepting discriminatory low payouts (cf levels set out in Uni redundancy policy for years of service etc), especially so if not union members. I've advised a few members like that over the years, including one who initially liked the sound of the severence deal on offer until they realised how much less it was than what they would get in a redundancy under rule ...and were then pretty pissed off that, as they saw it, a manager had tried to fool them into it. Too often those that go on such non-discipline related severences don't seem to realise what they are potentially losing, especially non unionised part time or fixed tem staff.

Why stop there?  Good pedigree puns

That's a good point and possibly dangerous ground for someone considering their position

I was being a bit aero headed , but just the one extra chocolate bar hint was a whisper I didn't quite chomp. The pic nic'd my brain and so a breakaway from awareness drifter to crisp happy hippo.

It also removes embarrassing headlines in the media for the company.  As soon as anyone tries to stir anything up they can just say the employees wanted to go and that's the end of the conversation.

It's a mutual agreement and the employee can refuse to accept it and carry on working as if nothing had happened.
The advantage to the employee is that they could accept it and take early retirement/change jobs for which neither would normally result in a monetary payout .
The advantage to the employer, is that they can shuffle people around from department to department and not have the predicament that it's the role that is being made redundant and not the person.
That's the way I believe it's supposed to work, what happens in reality is anyone's guess, but I would have thought that it would be the private sector that used it to shaft the employee as opposed to the public one.

unfortunately the public sector has taken to employing management people from the private sector because private sector practices are apparently 'better'. Thus shafting in the public sector is ever more prevalent.

MARS cannot really be forced upon either side.  The employee doesn't have to agree or enter into an agreement.

How delightfully naive. Read the news reports for the Universities concerned, like Wolverhampton. It's a major redundancy process, despite the disguise, and I've never seen one where significant numbers wouldn't have preferred to stay if there was a genuine free choice (nor one where students didn't suffer).

I had a bit of time to look this afternoon, and according to Citizens Advice, you can be sanctioned (benefits cut or not paid) for up to 3 months if you resign from your job "without good reason". Who decides if a MARS settlement is "good reason", I don't know!

But the options probably aren't stay vs MARS but  maybe redundancy vs MARS.  Given that, there will likely be those who prefer MARS over the uncertainty of redundancy, given a suitable pay-off.

You'd probably have to collect evidence at the time and build a case that you were persuaded into "resignation" by pressure from the employer, such that your confidence in your employer's intentions towards you was destroyed, you suffered mental anguish, worry loss of sleep etc and effectively in this weakened state resigned under duress? And claim it as constructive dismissal so not of your own making and not "without good reason"?

From duress you argue that any alleged consent was not "freely" given and you were not in an equal bargaining position as your employer used this arrangement to absolve itself of statutory obligations in the case of redundancy.

Might be a bit of a battle

Not really heard of this, but as a former union rep who has been involved in collective redundancy consultations (and helped save some jobs in the process), one thing that springs to mind is this. If some "voluntary redundancies" no longer get classified as redundancies, it is likely to enable large orgs to make more people "redundant" in waves without ever triggering the threshold for collective consultation (20 or more within 90 days). This makes it harder for a union or organised group of staff to push back and challenge the rationale. Sneaky.

At the same time, I have also seen people offered voluntary (non-redundancy) severance packages and happily take them, on an individual basis. It's right for some situations. 

I'd have thought both sides would be all for it. Helps you work, rest and play.