University to pay cleaners living wage... thanks to the Standard

In the email, Malcolm Grant said: "UCL will work towards implementing the London living wage pay rates in contracts with outsourced suppliers as they fall due for review over the next couple of years, in common with some other higher education institutions in London."

His press officer added: "UCL will now support the London living wage of £7.85 an hour. Our people will now be working towards implementation and transitional arrangements."

It represents a spectacular victory for UCL cleaners earning poverty wages of £5.80 an hour and the campaigners who fought their cause, as well as for the Evening Standard whose series of articles highlighting the issue is understood to have tipped the balance.

Confronted by the Standard last week, Mr Grant, 63, whose £404,000 remuneration last year exceeded cleaners' pay by 44 times, insisted: "UCL has no plans to join the London living wage campaign.

"I am advised that paying contract cleaners the living wage would cost UCL £500,000 to £1 million a year. That's a big slug. And what I haven't got is a spare £1 million, okay?"

But yesterday he changed his tune and a planned protest by students and staff outside his office turned into an impromptu victory celebration. Dozens of students, who brandished placards which read: "Shame on you UCL" and "Clean up your act" cheered as details of Mr Grant's capitulation were read out.

"This is a fantastic victory and a great day for the hundreds of minimum wage staff at UCL," said undergraduate and campaign co-founder Greg Brown.
"It marks a historic moment — the end to poverty wages at UCL. We've been fighting for two years and in all honesty, we couldn't have achieved it without the brilliant support of the Standard."

Colin Skeete, chairman of the local branch of the Unite union and part of the UCL campaign team, said: "Mr Grant is to be commended for taking such a brave step and for being prepared to make a 180-degree turn."

But Dr Jane Ferrie, senior research fellow in public health at UCL and a supporter of the campaign, said it amounted to "a public relations
disaster" for the provost.

"To denounce the living wage as a luxury he can't afford' in the Evening Standard on Thursday and then adopt it on the Monday night amounts to a great victory for campaigning journalism and for social justice, but an acute embarrassment for UCL management."

She also paid tribute to cleaners "who risked their jobs by speaking out", and the student campaign leaders "who put their careers aside to help people they might never meet".

She went on: "It's these moral values on which our university was originally built."

The breakthrough came as new Labour leader Ed Miliband put the living wage at the heart of his policy agenda. In his debut speech to the packed Labour Party conference in Manchester yesterday, he said: "The minimum wage is not enough. The foundation of our economy in the future must be a
living wage."

There was also good news for the broader London living wage campaign, with Islington council announcing a new deal for its 150 cleaning staff from November.

The council's deputy leader, Richard Greening, said: "The council is taking an important step in making Islington a fairer borough by ensuring that staff who clean council buildings are paid properly.

"Bringing the service back in-house means we have been able to redirect money spent on contractors' profits to increase cleaners' pay to the
London living wage of £7.85 per hour. We've done this without increasing the cost to council taxpayers."

UCL is the seventh London university to adopt the living wage, the others being LSE, Birkbeck, SOAS, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Queen Mary and Goldsmiths.

In 2008, Mayor Boris Johnson committed the Greater London Authority to the living wage, and Barclays, HSBC, KPMG and the Royal London Hospital are among more than 100 employers to adopt and champion it.

The provost confirmed to Mr Brown and his fellow campaigners that he will stick to this pledge "whatever the upcoming government spending cuts" and however they affect his £713 million budget.

Sol Gamsu, a UCL campaign leader, said he hoped the university would follow the leads of Birkbeck and SOAS in rewriting its agreement with contract cleaning companies to pay the living wage straight away.

"The UCL cleaners desperately need the money now, not in two years' time," he said. "We hope the provost understands this."