The practical implications for your building are:

Your dedicated team of security staff will lose their jobs.

We have all been told our jobs will no longer exist, but we can apply for new posts under the new structure. 40 out of 256 of the current guards will be made redundant. Most of the new posts will be on significantly reduced hours (resulting in a £13,500 per year pay cut) and will have increased and more difficult workloads.

This is a violation of UCL’s equality, diversity and inclusion principles.

This move to reduce and downgrade security staff comes after a long standing and popular campaign to have facilities workers brought in-house, as already this workforce (the most racialised workforce at UCL) has among the worst pay and conditions on campus. The fact that long-serving, migrant and Black and Asian workers are arbitrarily facing job cuts and downgrading at the height of a cost-of-living crisis, seriously undermines UCL’s commitments to race equality. This is a discriminatory attack on a racialised constituency of the workforce and breaches UCL’s equality, diversity and inclusion policies.  

A new team of guards will be employed at the different buildings around UCL. They will be changed every hour throughout the day.

Under the existing plans, the Building Attendant position will be removed from UCL’s security provision. This means there will be no dedicated stationed security staff in buildings, as these will be replaced with "roaming security staff" roles around campus. Every hour the guards will change posts. This means you will rarely see any of the guards you know and even then, they will only be on site for 1 hour. These new roles will make security staff working outdoors responsible for customer service-type tasks as well as securing the campus. 

The personal and friendly relationship departmental staff and students have with their security staff will be lost.

This is because the guards will change so often you will never get to know them. And similarly, the guards will not feel the same personal commitment to the buildings and their staff that is felt now because each guard will only ever visit each building occasionally. What’s more, security staff in buildings currently help with a range of things, from taking deliveries, opening up rooms, and supporting students who’ve lost their ID cards. This will also be lost.

These changes do not have to take place. There is a consultation period between now and the end of July. The security staff and our unions will be engaging in this consultation. There is neither financial nor operational justification for these changes. The absence of dedicated security colleagues in buildings will severely impact departments and workloads. There is no reason why UCL should adopt these new arrangements if they are not in the best interests of staff, students and the rest of our community.  

UCL can stop the restructure! 

Your support, by signing this petition, will be greatly appreciated...

We also encourage you to raise these issues by writing to:

- your Head of Department and Building Manager (template here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSjY82li2orQFlTBpA0ktkj9uCqGkvLQNUFxJORZoy4/edit?usp=sharing)

- your departmental Inclusion Lead (template here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NrFcvoH6NIGRSucoHDzi6CHH0tQnvKYWnzFdksCkUmQ/edit?usp=sharing)

- the Provost (template here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SEffFD7aXVTvXfY6JbkW6hP9slVd9urQWlUencJ1aM0/edit?usp=sharing)