Recommendation 30

We heard however from Professor Rebecca Lunn, University of Strathclyde, that each university had taken a different line on whether to furlough staff because the information coming out of UK Government departments and UKRI was “completely different for months”.75 She said that universities “were left in a complete lottery of trying to make a risk-based judgment on which was the better thing to do as universities, and each university [had] done something different”.76 In her view the communication around the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was “unbelievably unclear”77 and it would have been “better if the Treasury and UKRI had had a conversation and come to an agreement about what advice to give to universities” as “they did eventually, but it took the best part of five months”.78 Professor Katherine Smith, University of Strathclyde, made similar points to us about the effectiveness of UK Government communications in relation to covid-19 interventions, telling us that: There has been a lot of unclear communication about who can apply or not and when it is best to apply and so on. For me, a key issue has been around communication and apparent shifts in the position of what you can and cannot do.79