Year End Spend Update From The Director of Finance

Dear Colleagues,

As we near the end of our financial year (31 July 2021), colleagues are reminded of the continued need to limit our non-pay spend.

While the outlook is much brighter as Covid-19 restrictions gradually relax and we move closer to a return to “business as usual”, the University continues to work within extremely challenging financial conditions.

We can all take steps to help the University through this challenging period and budget-holders in particular have a critical role to play through continuing to minimise spend.

Most urgently, we need your support in ensuring we significantly reduce end-of-year outlay. In previous years, we have seen an increase of up to £5m in spending as budget-end nears. This cannot happen this year and therefore any unspent budget for 20/21 must only be used where absolutely essential.

I appreciate you will continue to get purchasing and expenditure requests from within your School or Department and encourage you to share this email with staff as required to help respond to these.

To help with our planning, it would be appreciated if you could notify our Procurement team of any significant essential spend that needs to be incurred between now and year-end, so that we can discuss this in good time. Similarly, any queries relating to this can also be forwarded to the Procurement Team, who will be closely monitoring spend between now and the end of July.

Thank you for your continued support.

Frank Richardson