23 February 2022 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
FINANCE FESTIVAL – LAST CHANCE TO BOOK
This is the last Digest before the BUFDG Finance Festival closes for booking. The Festival is our online finance extravaganza taking place from Monday 14–16 March, via the Hopin platform. The most important thing to note is that it’s completely FREE to all staff at BUFDG universities – you can join 1,200 other colleagues from across the sector and book with this link using your BUFDG website account or, if you don’t have an account yet, you can register for an account on the website here.
You can find the full programme on the conference mini-site, and that link also provides you with details of session times, titles, synopses, and speaker details for each of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so you can find the sessions that you want to attend and make space in your diary. So, don’t hang around. Book now!
SECTOR / GENERAL
DfE has launched an anonymous survey to gather feedback on the Department for Education’s Sustainability and Climate Change draft strategy. The survey is open until 20th February. The more higher education voices the Department hears through the survey, the better. Here is the view from UUK.
The IFS has published a summary of what it describes as the government “quietly tightening the financial screws on students, graduates, and universities”. The article looks at both maintenance loan entitlements and loan repayment thresholds, and estimates that “the government is saving £2.3billion on student loans under the cover of high inflation”. There are a couple of fascinating charts, as well as a link to the whizzy Student Finance Calculator. Essential reading, also covered by the Evening Standard. And, in related news, results of the National Student Accommodation Survey run by Save the Student finds that full-time students are being hit hard by the rise in energy costs.
This all comes before the expected publication of the government’s Augar-related response later this week. The advance briefing seems to suggest a continued freeze on the £9,250 tuition fee for at least another two years, by which point inflation will have probably eroded the original amount to below the £7k mark.
HEFCW has published a consultation on the distribution of additional funding for 2021/22. There’s a tight turnaround, with responses required by 28 Feb.
The UCAS January deadline data has arrived and showing, as expected, an increase in the number of UK 18 year-olds applying (5%) but a decrease in mature applicants – a return to the norm following the jump during the pandemic. There has also been a big increase in applications from China and India, propping up a healthy international student market. David Kernohan at Wonkhe has delved into the numbers.
Two OfS updates of note – firstly there’s a substantial publication on the Geography of Teaching Provision in England, along with the accompanying data set. Our curiosity naturally draws us to the zoomable map. The OfS has also published its response to its consultation on funding for ‘World-leading Specialist Providers’. If you think you might be one, you have until the 28th March to convince the regulator.
Lastly, UUK has an interesting policy report looking at the pros and cons of using graduate earnings and highly-skilled employment as measures of the benefits of HE.
TAXES
This month’s Employer Bulletin was published on 16 February, and we have summarised the main points in this article so you know if there’s anything you want to read more on. It covers updates on CJRS, Freeports NIC reliefs, NMW and SMP, reporting expenses and benefits, and much, much more.
In an article relevant to both BUFDG and HEPA members, a European Court of Justice case, Vodafone Portugal, considered whether termination fees that were charged by Vodafone if a customer exited a mobile phone contract early, were subject to VAT. The Court ruled that there was a sufficient link between the exit charge and the main supply in the contract. So, as the mobile phone contracts were VATable, the early exit fee was also VATable. This case has led HMRC to review its treatment of termination and compensation payments, with potential implications for universities. To read more about the case and its consequences for the sector, we’ve put this article together. If you have any subsequent questions or comments, please contact Andrea.
Thank you to the 180 members who attended an excellent training session on Off Payroll status training (IR35 and the self-employed). You can now access the recording of the event, as well download a copy of the slides; please do feel free to share this link with your colleagues. For those of you who weren’t able to attend and a reminder to those that did, the break starts after 1:38 so you will need to fast forward 10 minutes from that point. For anyone interested in purchasing a copy of Rebecca’s very useful book on CEST, you can find out more, including on the discount available for BUFDG members, on this article.
A certain bus analogy springs to mind this week as HMRC and the NAO both publish papers assessing the effects of the off-payroll working rules. HMRC's third party commissioned paper entitled Long Term Effects of the Off-Payroll Working Rules Reform for the Public Sector was a looking-back exercise, with more statistical analysis of 'how many people said what' rather than documenting lessons learnt. The report suggested there was little change to the public sector workforce structure, nor were there additional administrative burdens as a result of the off-payroll reforms introduced in 2017. Conversely, the National Audit Office Investigation into the implementation of IR35 tax reforms focuses on the challenges faced by the public sector who were given very little time with the new guidance before the rules came into effect. Read the full article here.
OTHER
The strange world of USS scheme funding changes quickly these days, but USS published a ‘latest picture’ update on 16 February. It gives a recap of the current situation, provides an update on the monitoring framework, and looks at the impact of recent proposals.
UNIAC is holding an online meeting on the Trends and Challenges in internal audit in HE for 2022. It takes place on Wednesday 30 March, and includes a range of UNIAC speakers plus Smita Jamdar (Partner and Head of Education - Shakespeare Martineau LLP) and Nolan Smith (Director of Resources and Finance - the Office for Students). To find out more, download the flyer here, and use this link to book.
Eversheds Sutherland has a couple of interesting free webinars coming up that will be relevant to readers. First up is an Introduction to Contracts for Education Institutions, which looks at the legal essentials for contract formation and the meaning of some common clauses found in contracts. This one will be held on 3 March and again in September. Second is an explainer on IP Commercialisation for HEIs on 30 March (and again in November).
In the latest episode of Shakespeare Martineau’s Going Further & Higher Education podcast, Smita Jamdar, partner and head of education at Shakespeare Martineau speaks to Mike Wills, director of strategy & policy at SHMA’s cyber security company CSS Assure about the serious threats universities and colleges face and what they can do to protect themselves from cyber-attacks.
JOB OF THE FORTNIGHT
We have two Jobs of the Fortnight this time around. The first is for a Senior Finance Business Partner at the University of East Anglia. The successful candidate will lead on managing financial activity across a designated UEA Faculty, and work closely with colleagues, budget managers and other stakeholder to deliver challenging financial plans. The deadline for applications is 3 March.
The second is for a Group Finance Manager at the University of York. The university is looking for someone to “be responsible for the production of the University's consolidated financial statements incorporating the coordination of the strategic report, accounts and supporting notes”, as well as to “lead on the production of government returns, balance sheet monitoring and forecasting and produce the related Board and Committee reports”. The deadline for this one is 21st March.
You can find lots of other vacancies on the BUFDG Jobs page.
