Much of the Leadership Race’s coverage will be focused on these elected officials, but much less attention is given to the role of the Union itself and how it operates.
Once described as the “essence of College life”, the Union is central to our student experience at UCL. Apart from running a string of highly popular commercial outlets including the bars, cafes, and the campus shop, the Union also runs key events across the student calendar, from the Welcome Fair to the upcoming London Varsity. It is also home to over 400 clubs and societies – including this paper – which it funds and regulates.
As well as being a provider of services, the Union is also an advocacy body – as its name suggests – representing the interests of UCL students at University level and beyond. Just two years ago, it co-founded a national advocacy group with the unions of 24 Russell Group universities. It continues to be a member of the scandal-ridden National Union of Students, despite having double its annual turnover.
The growing importance of the Union cannot be overstated. Yet, opinion polling by The Cheese Grater suggests that most students either don’t know or don’t care about what their elected officials are up to. This article will seek to shed some light on the mysterious bureaucratic machine that is Students’ Union UCL.
Zones and Exec
One of the primary ways the Union makes decisions is through one of its three “Policy Zones”. It’s helpful to think of Zones as the lower chamber of Union democracy, with each Zone representing a different area of student life: Activities Zone for clubs and societies, Education Zone for, well, education, and Welfare and Community Zone for all-things housing and wellbeing. Each Zone is chaired by the responsible sabbatical officer and meets about five times a year to discuss campus matters and policy proposals from the student body.
Zones are attended by voting members – typically officers and reps, elected in the October elections – as well as journalists from The Cheese Grater by virtue of the fact that no other UCL paper has bothered to turn up. In fact, these Zones are open to all students, with details of each meeting circulated on the What’s On calendar in advance. They nonetheless struggle with low turnout often because students are unaware that they exist, meaning there are no real consequences for reps if they miss a meeting – even though they can, in theory, be sacked for continued non-attendance, as one sabb candidate has proposed to do.
Policies passed at Zones get sent to the Union Executive – think of it as the Union’s upper chamber, or Senate – where it either gets ratified, at which point it becomes Union policy, or thrown back to the Zones akin to parliamentary ping-pong.
Policies made this way can take months, even years to reach the point where it become official Union policy, as was the case for Fossil Free Career activists, but it remains a powerful bottom-up process for students – any student – to make positive and lasting change at UCL, that is, until it lapses in three years’ time.
This process is nonetheless riddled with red tape and shady backroom deals as Union sabbs and their court eunuchs (the senior management team) continue to hold significant sway over agenda-setting and policy proposals by suggesting amendments so they are aligned to the Union’s long-term strategy.
Political leadership
The Union sabbs – as readers will no doubt have read about repeatedly in this issue – are paid £33,000 a year to determine the strategic direction of the Union. They work on priority projects loosely – and we mean, loosely – based on their manifesto pledges. Collectively, they represent the political leadership of the Union with the primary objective of improving student life at UCL.
The sabbs work closely alongside a small team of senior executives, a group of permanent staff at the Union whose job it is to advise the inexperienced elected leadership. They include CEO John Dubber, Director of Student Experience Carl Salton-Brooks, Director of Policy, Governance and Advocacy Simon To, Director of Finance Dorota Dominiczak, and Director of Operations Deb Nichols.
Not much is known about these court eunuchs apart from the fact that they once saved the Union from the verge of bankruptcy after the elected sabbs burnt an effigy of the Vice Provost, which resulted in UCL freezing the Union’s funding and snubbing it of a new building where the Student Centre is today. Perhaps the eunuchs dish out some good advice from time to time.
Board of Trustees
As is the case with any registered charity in the UK, supreme power lies with the gatekeepers of the Union, the Board of Trustees, “responsible for overall management and administration of the Students’ Union and may exercise all the powers of the Union.”
The Board consists of the six sabb officers, four elected student trustees, and three external appointed members who are often UCL alumni, staff, or affiliates. The trustees are legally required to act in the best interests of the Union, before any of their own.
This also means the Board is quite a boring place to be. While, in theory, the Board can overturn executive decisions if (say) they risk legal and financial repercussions, or are incompatible with the Union’s charitable objectives under the Education Act, this power is rarely exercised. Indeed, in those rare instances that force them to act, it’s often to do with students expecting the Union to do or say things that are outside of their legal remits of acting in the best interests of “students as students”. Such is also the case for most students’ unions in the country under the Education Act 1994.
