The University of East London has been reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) for a second time over concerns that it has failed to address issues with work-related stress.

University and College Union (UCU) members previously took a complaint about the institution to the regulator in 2021.

This prompted the HSE to write to the university that it had “identified contraventions of health and safety law”, despite having “clear evidence of the risk of stress-related ill health arising from their work activities”.

It initially issued an improvement notice to the university though this was later downgraded to the less serious notification of contravention after an appeal. 

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The university said it took the health and safety of its staff very seriously and was “continuously improving our practice”.

But the UCU branch has now claimed in a further complaint to the regulator that its previous concerns have gone unresolved, and that conditions are getting worse. 

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UCU alleges that UEL has not implemented the tailored advice issued by the HSE following its previous investigation, and that its staff stress risk assessment has not been updated since 2022. It has also raised concerns to the HSE that there have been “at least five” changes of head of health and safety in the last five years.

Ruth Brown, UCU’s safety representative, said the university has become “dysfunctional” owing to workload pressures.

“We’ve continually raised concerns since 2019 – that’s a long time now, and they’ve done nothing to improve things,” she said.

“Things have gotten even worse” since the 2021 investigation, she said, which is not just down to a “cumulative effect” of successive years of high workloads, but “[management] have actually done things that have made things even worse”, which have “put even more pressure on staff”. 

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The university’s own staff survey in 2025 found only 46 per cent of academics agreed their workload was reasonable, falling to 34 per cent in one school. 

Brown outlined that student numbers have “roughly doubled” since 2019 while staff numbers have not risen at the same place, and noted that a new workload model was implemented in 2022 that saw staff allocated an equivalent of seven extra working days a year “beyond contracted hours”.

There has also been a “mass downgrading” of staff grades, used to help determine performance-related pay, which Brown said has been “very demoralising” and caused “widespread distress”. 

A spokesperson for UEL said: “We take the health, safety and well-being of our staff very seriously and work on continuously improving our practice – not only on maintaining legal compliance – in line with our strategic focus that health gain is a precondition of learning gain. 

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“Our robust and proactive progress and performance tracking of this, including quarterly updates, are shared with the whole university community.” 

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com