BUFDG Digest - 12 February 2025

BUFDG

We’re pleased to let you know that the BUFDG Finance Festival, taking place this year from 10-12 March, is now fully CPD certified. This means that attending the event can contribute up to 12 hours to your personal professional development record. So, why not join the 1,300 colleagues from across the sector signed up so far, and build-your-own programme from 28 sessions covering everything from Cash to Commercialisation, from Finance Tech to Funding, and Strategy to Sustainability. The Festival is completely free to all those working in H E, and your single ticket allows you to enter and exit the event at any time, to suit your existing timetable. There’s no need to book each session individually. Any questions; here’s Matt.

SECTOR

As expected, news over the last fortnight has covered the Higher Education funding situation (current and future), with the Guardian noting the crisis throughout the sector, with a quarter of Russell Group institutions running redundancy and restructuring schemes. It also published an editorial on Tuesday highlighting the impact on academics. David Kernohan at Wonkhe has updated his analysis of sector finances following the publication of more universities’ financial statements. Debbie McVitty has considered the UCAS end-of-cycle data (analysis by DK) and explores why some institutions would choose to take on more ‘loss-making’ home undergraduates in the middle of a financial crunch.

In other news, there has been a flurry of sector submissions to this year’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), including BUFDG's own response including requests/suggestions on pensions, tuition fees, research funding, and a number of tax changes. The UUK response follows on from the recommendations in last year’s Blueprint publication (and will presumably align with the output from the ongoing Taskforce), and includes additional investment in research and innovation, and the reintroduction of conditional maintenance grants, among other things. Here are the submissions from GuildHE, University Alliance, London Higher, and the Wellcome Trust.

To wrap up the key points, the OfS has published the PwC review of the first Data Futures collection, and recommendations for the next phase, while the DfE has opened a consultation on franchising within H E, with the aim of improving OfS regulation of an area of activity that has taken a lot of recent criticism.

WALES

There has been lots of commentary on the financial position of Welsh universities too over the last fortnight. Wales Online laments the ‘£70m black hole’ in the sector’s finances, while the BBC focuses on Cardiff’s recently-announced job cuts, and a response from Universities Wales. The regulator Medr published a statement on 31 January acknowledging the challenges facing the sector, and namechecked Cardiff’s restructuring consultation.

The debate reached the Senedd, where the 5 February saw a discussion on sector finances (starting at 3:57), including a call for the Welsh Government to work with the UK Government to identify sustainable solutions for the future of higher education. As usual there’s a helpful summary on Wonkhe for those without a commute to listen to the full exchange, including consideration of what a review of the “demand, provision and distribution of subject areas in H E in Wales” that the H E minister Vicki Howells plans to request from the regulator might look like.

SCOTLAND

The Scottish Government has introduced its new Tertiary Education and Training Bill. Michael Salmon in Wonkhe explains the potential impacts for the sector, including revised responsibilities and powers for the Scottish Funding Council, potentially including additional financial sustainability reporting.

Salix would like to hear about the appetite for potential future applications to Scotland’s Public Sector Heat Decarbonisation Fund, Recycling Fund and Scottish Public Sector Energy Efficiency Loan Scheme, should funding become available. Interested parties are asked to complete this expression of interest form by Friday 14 February at 4pm to help Salix, alongside Scottish Government, make decisions on budget allocation across the various funding schemes and tailor future phases.

The IFS is continuing its analysis of the Scottish Budget, with an event next Thursday (20 February) looking at the fiscal and spending outlook, public sector employment and pay, and tax strategy and policy, among other areas. There’s more information and a registration link here.

NORTHERN IRELAND

The BBC reports that the maintenance loans for Northern Irish students will increase by 20%, or over £1,000 for the 25/26 academic year. The economy minister Conor Murphy made the announcement, which will cost around £50 million, and comes on top of a 40% increase in 2022. The announcement has been welcomed by the NUS.

PENSIONS

For UCEA members, January’s pension newsletter has been published, summarising key developments on HE specific pensions, along with a general UCEA update. The pensions update page also covers the latest on UCEA’s lobbying efforts to reduce TPS employer costs, including a summary of the conversation between UCEA representatives and Minister for Skills Jacqui Smith, and the letter to the Treasury co-signed by UCEA and UCU asking for, among other things, the 2031 review of the SCAPE discount rate methodology to be urgently brought forward.

A reminder that if you are a pensions professional in the sector, or would just like to learn more about pensions in HE, then BUFDG has a range of resources available. These Summary Tables summarise the differences between the main schemes, while Chapter 2 of our Accounting for Pensions in Higher Education has more detail. We also have an e-learning course 'Intro to Pensions in HE' which you can access from here, and a Knowledge Hub page containing all our Pensions resources.

SORP

The proposed SORP has undergone an extensive development process, and many across the sector have contributed. The Financial Reporting Council has approved the release of the Exposure Draft, along with the launch of a 12-week public consultation. Comments are invited to be submitted by midday on Wednesday, 30 April 2025.

Following the completion of the public consultation exercise, the Financial Reporting Group will review and make recommendations to the FEHE SORP Board, which will consider all responses and agree any recommended revisions before submitting the final SORP 2026 document to the Financial Reporting Council for its consideration. Subject to approval of the Financial Reporting Council, the Board anticipates that a final version of the SORP will be published in August 2025. Any change to this timeline will be communicated widely.

Following consultation and the finalisation of the new SORP, the Financial Reporting Group intends to publish additional guidance relating to the key changes in FRS 102 relevant to Higher and Further Education, and model financial statements for Higher Education Providers. Draft versions of this guidance that are based on the FEHE SORP Exposure Draft can be found on the BUFDG SORP Knowledge Hub along with information on the project.

The focus now turns to training and dissemination. As well as a dedicated session at the Finance Festival on 11 March 2025, a series of regional workshops is being planned for May and June 2025.

RESEARCH

UKRI has announced an increase to the PHD student stipend rate to £20,780 from October 2025, representing an 8% rise – the largest real-terms increase since 2003. The announcement is made alongside the publication of a report analysing the impact of stipend levels, that highlights the desire to match stipends with the national living wage, and a policy statement confirming that research organisations will need to adopt the recently-appraised UKRI standard terms and conditions of grant for 25/26 onwards.

The increased stipend will hopefully contribute to the ‘attraction of top talent’, as advocated for by science minister Patrick Vallance in commentary provided to the Science, Innovation, and Technology committee on Tuesday. On the other side of the equation, you may have seen Wonkhe’s summary last week linking to the Public Accounts Committee findings that upfront payment in full of the Immigration Health Surcharge is a ‘huge deterrent’ for postdocs and risks the UK falling behind competing nations.

UKRI has also published the outcome of three independent evaluations commissioned by Research England on the effectiveness of Knowledge Exchange funding, covering the HEIF programme and the first round of the Connecting Capability Fund (CCF). Among other findings, the first HEIF study determined an ROI of nearly £15 for every £1 invested by the programme. Here is an explainer from James Coe in Wonkhe.

TAX

We’re pleased to report that, after a short hiatus, our Tax Brief newsletter is back, alongside the more in-depth TaxHE. The former is probably more useful for those with a passing or tangential interest in Tax, or who just need the major stories, while the latter is aimed at specialists. You can always find the most recent examples of both via this page link. In the Tax news this time around:

Thanks to BDO who, upon our request, have updated their Electric Vehicle salary sacrifice general guidance document to reflect updated tax implications from 2025. The document summarises the key features of a salary sacrifice, the benefits of offering this type of arrangement and other considerations if you are thinking of implementing a scheme.

We’ve implemented a new Teams user group for payroll specialists who use MHR’s i-Trent for payroll. If you would like to be involved, please email Julia.

A brief summary of the latest BUFDG Global Mobility roundtable is available here. There was a great deal of talk around more employment law implications and one member highlighted L&E Global's cross-border remote work FAQs as a good source of information.

Finally, Andrea would appreciate high level outlines of arrangements where universities and NHS Trusts share facilities. This is so that she covers as many scenarios as possible in the final BUFDG/HFMA paper in the series of VAT papers on universities and NHS Trusts working together. Please see this discussion thread.

PROCUREMENT

Following on from previous HEPA communications, we are pleased to announce that the onboarding process for the Central Digital Platform (CDP) opened for our sector on Monday.  You can find out all of the information you need relating to onboarding – including the link to the CDP – in this letter.  We are also pleased to share a series of hints and tips for onboarding – you can review these in this document. 

With many colleagues preparing for the go-live of the Procurement Act on 24 February 2025, the deadline for the Procurement Value Survey (PVS) has been extended until close of business on Friday 7 March 2025.

The Cabinet Office recently published the Procurement Specific Questionnaire (PSQ).  As promised, we can now share the updated PSQ which includes the PPN questions, largely in Part 3B.  You can download the PSQ here.

As ever, if you have any questions about procurement reform, the PVS or procurement more widely then please do not hesitate to get in touch with Ashley.

MISCELLANEOUS

Jisc have published a major report on Digital Transformation in universities, as a follow up to a pilot project run last year with 24 institutions making use of the recently-developed Digital Transformation Toolkit. The report “shares the approaches universities are adopting to achieve digital transformation in a resource constrained landscape supported by Jisc’s framework for digital transformation in higher education and maturity model for digital transformation".

While we’re talking Digital; a reminder that in 2023 BUFDG, in conjunction with KPMG, published Ahead in the Cloud: Finance System Implementation in HE. The guide helps sector providers understand how to successfully implement new finance and other major systems, drawing on the experience, thoughts, and advice of senior Finance, IT and transformation leads in a sample of universities around the country. The guide can be downloaded directly with this link.

BUFDG members interested in impact investing are invited to Snowball’s Annual Showcase on Tuesday 13 May in London. For more information on this topic, a recording of the ‘Navigating the landscape of impact investing for universities’ webinar with Snowball and the Impact Investing Institute can be found on the Treasury and Investment knowledge hub.

Our Job of the Fortnight is for a Deputy Director of Finance at Edge Hill University. The role includes “ensuring statutory accounts for the University and subsidiary companies are produced and management accounting information is provided to key decision makers and budget holders”, as part of an “efficient and effective service which supports multiple stakeholders demands.” The deadline for applications is 19 February.

Lots of other vacancies can be found on the BUFDG jobs page.