The current financial climate is extremely difficult for students and staff alike. With rising food, transport and accommodation costs, coupled with the scrapping of maintenance grants, we are all feeling the squeeze.

It is for this reason that being told that our former Vice-Chancellor, Nigel Thrift, received a voluntary gift of £92,000 from a three-man Remuneration Committee is extremely difficult to take, and appears astonishingly inept and out-of-touch with ordinary people’s lives.

£42,000 of this was apparently 'benchmarking against the sector average' for his achievements, while £50,000 was an arbitrary amount given because Professor Thrift developed relationships with Monash and California - a sum plucked from the air by three individuals.

None of this helps postgraduates who teach who are being paid very little, nor students who are struggling to get by week to week. In fact, it is an insult to them - especially given that these measures were essentially part of a job for which he was already paid an extremely large base salary with considerable benefits. By contrast, the University's own guidelines state that the gift for any staff member attaining 10 years' service is a letter of thanks and a pen.

While the fact that Professor Thrift chose to donate the £50,000 sum towards student bursaries shows commendable intent, it is also a disingenuous move which amounts to little more than a hollow PR gesture. This is not money coming directly out of his own pocket and the goodness of his heart, as was suggested by the original announcement - it is a gift which was arbitrarily handed to him and is obviously considered superfluous to requirements. The additional £42,000 also puts paid to the long-stated defence of Professor Thrift's own base-salary having been frozen for 3 years, which was used to justify a comparable freeze for University staff.

It hardly needs to be suggested just how much £92,000 would buy - three well-qualified, full-time student mental health workers for a year; innumerable bursaries for junior doctors or students from low-income backgrounds; five full-time clerical officers at the University. At a time when staff have been told repeatedly that there is no money available for pay-rises in line with basic inflation and industrial action on this issue has been roundly condemned by employers, such an appropriation represents an astonishing misjudgement.

The SU has long campaigned to be on the committee which decides the pay of the Vice-Chancellor and senior management, to represent the student voice and provide a sense of perspective which this decision proves is desperately lacking at the moment. This farcical and disgraceful episode shows that the need for student representation on this committee is more pressing than ever, particularly given how utterly disconnected its members appear to be from the everyday struggles faced by most staff and students.

Incoming V-C Stuart Croft has called for a full transparency review of our University Council, and we can only support this. As Sabbatical Officers, it is disheartening to know that key decisions like this are being made behind closed doors with no consideration for the message it sends out to the students whose spiralling fees pay for such arbitrary and excessive perks, nor the staff who quite simply deserve better.

We the undersigned, call for:

1. An apology to students and staff from the Remuneration Committee for its gross misjudgement.

2. Nigel Thrift to reject the £42,000 windfall not already donated to the Bursary Fund.

3. Student representation on the Remuneration Committee.

4. Publication of the unredacted minutes of the Remuneration Committee.

5. A full investigation into the practices of the University's Remuneration Committee, with a view to greater clarity and meaningful reform.

6. An increase in student bursaries by £92,000.

7. A renewed commitment to improving the wages of postgraduate teachers at the University, who have been told repeatedly that there is not enough money available to fund this.

8. Replacement of the £92,000 parting gift with the award offered to any other member of University staff with 10 years' service: a letter of thanks and a pen.