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Responses from your recent feedback is shared on this page.
Please send your feedback via the following form. https://forms.office.com/e/uFMgRi4t1C
Q: In my experience, a lack of HR support for international staff on visa and immigration matters is a significant issue at UCL. [Significant quantity of personal information redacted]. This entire experience placed a considerable strain on both my finances and mental well-being. Therefore, I recommend that UCL implement training sessions on visa and immigration policies for the HR department to better support international staff.
A: Whilst our HR teams strive to provide excellent advice and a robust service, sometimes things don’t go as well as we might hope. In this particular case the Faculty HR Manager will be reaching out to resolve the matter, and will be impressing across the team the importance and criticality of timeliness and accuracy when dealing with visa issues.
Q: PGTA admin and pay
I wanted to flag some issues with Post Graduate Teaching Assisting around the administration of this. My contract and hours sent through originally were incorrect and much lower than was clearly needed for the module, at 9 hours when the module needed 8x3hr labs where I would be teaching. I was then sent a P45 through complete error during the middle of the course. I then had to chase quite hard to make sure I got paid for the work I did. If this were a one-off issue I would not be raising this, but I know others who have had similar issues, many of whom I suspect did not pursue this in the end and get paid what they should have. I also did several hours of online training courses as onboarding as UCL staff which was unpaid, or if it should have been this was no clear at all and should have be communicated. These kind of issues disincentivise PhD students to take on PGTA work, why spend a whole day doing unpaid training courses when your teaching time only adds up to a few days?
I also did not find it very transparent around prep time for workshops and this seems to be at the discretion of the course coordinator. Thankfully mine was more than happy to pay for this, but I know this has not been the case for others or other PhD students have been very surprised to hear this was possible, clearly having no idea they could have prepped better and been paid. I understand students are often disappointed with quality of the PGTA's they have in their labs/workshops. If it were made clear to PGTA's they can and should be paid for time spent prepping for teaching then I'm sure this quality would improve.
I provide these experiences not as complaints, but as feedback. I hope it could be useful to help improve the outcomes for PGTA's and the students they help teach.
A: The process for PGTA payments has changed within the past couple of years, and there is a need to adapt and improve our systems. Sadly there are still some issues and so thank you for your feedback highlighting this.
The Division of Biosciences is reviewing how they support PGTAs and very much appreciate the work that they do for UCL. This academic year there will be a trial of a different system to set up contracts so that processing time should hopefully improve.
Q: The limits for expenses claims for overseas subsistence (meals) do not appear to have been increased for many years. Given the weakening of sterling in recent years and recent inflation shocks globally, the per diem for overseas trips now does not even come close to covering a typical low-budget meal in many countries (try buying lunch for £7 in the US!). Therefore conference trips for ECRs in particular are becoming unsustainably expensive as they incur substantial and unavoidable out of pocket costs due to these outdated limits in the expenses policy. Please can these limits be updated asap (ideally with retrospective uplifts allowed for claims made in the last 12 months), and be reviewed on an annual basis to increase in line with inflation?
Furthermore, the requirement for line-by-line claims for every meal is a substantial waste of time, particularly as the expense limits mean actual expenses are only ever partially reimbursed, therefore could the policy be changed to allow single total per diem subsistence claims instead?
A: The leadership briefing on 30 June referred to an update coming soon in this area (https://liveuclac.sharepoint.com/sites/UCLLeadershipComms/SitePages/University-Management-Committee-(UMC)-summaries--Summer-Term,-AY-2022-23.aspx) and Ed Hall (LMS Head of Finance) and colleagues have been working hard to make the new policy less proscriptive. Unfortunately there was no proposal to change the way expenses are input, although if we are moving away from fractional reclaims to a larger allowance this will hopefully be less of a chore in the future.
Q: Iprocurement should inform UCL purchasers when a company is being taken off the purchasing list.
A: UCL has almost 40,000 suppliers on MyFinance. In line with statutory requirements (Anti Bribery & Corruption, Anti Money Laundering, and a new Duty to Prevent Fraud, and Modern Slavery), policy (UCL Supply Chain Policy), best practice and UCL’s values, we are required to conduct various reviews across our suppliers.
To limit the substantial compliance costs for UCL, suppliers with whom UCL does not conduct business in 18 months are rendered inactive. There is a quarterly upload of reports on suppliers due to be rendered inactive to the intranet.
To prevent them being switched off requires a quick email to Procurement@ucl.ac.uk rather than needing to log a ticket, however this needs proactive management by the department to ensure that the request happens before the switch off, and that the requestor does not breach UCL’s No-PO/No-Pay policy.
Q: Could we arrange visits to research areas for a short talk/demo? This would be great to share research across different areas and also help professional services teams learn more about the work they support. Steve Wilson has said he would be happy to host a visit!
A: Yes. We’ve already discussed the feasibility of doing this in the FLS staff survey action group, so great timing. Emilie Avisse is leading the group working on this area, so I’ll ask her to reach out to Steve as a pilot visit.
Q: Salad should be provided for free when purchasing lunch meals. UCL should promote and encourage healthy living and balanced diet which includes fruit/veg.
A: I passed your suggestion to the relevant director in Estates. They have responsibility for managing the Gather&Gather contract (more information about G&G locations here) and are the decision-makers in this area. Their response is as follows:
“In terms of hospitality, we have recently updated our brochure for Spring/Summer and our standard to have salad included in all of our standard working lunch menus (which can be found here: https://www.foodatucl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Events-at-UCL-Sprin...)
In reference to the refectory, unfortunately due to our commercial model and the ongoing food price inflation, it’s simply not viable for us to offer salad items for free. What we are currently looking at, is making our offer more flexible so that customers can, for example choose a simple salad or portion of veg in place of chips.”