Letters
Please send your letters to Ruth Taylor at the.reporter@leeds.ac.uk or send them by post to: The Reporter, Employee communications team, Room 12.72, E C Stoner Building.
All letters will be published at the editor's discretion. Please provide your full name, honorifics, and the name of your department or school. We will not as a rule publish anonymous letters (unless a name is supplied to the editor), 'round robin' letters, letters that have been published elsewhere, or letters that have also been sent to University colleagues for action. Letters may be cut (for space) and we will indicate when this has happened. If writers have asked questions, we will attempt to answer them. We may add an editor's note to correct any factual errors.
I recently visited Ghana - close to the biggest gold mine in Africa - where I read with great interest about the University organising a fourday course with the Smallpeice Trust to attract students to a career in mining.
The mining company AngloAmerican once again in 2006 recorded record profits of £3 billion, at the same time that War On Want indicts the company and its subsidiary AngloGold Ashanti for human rights abuses in Obuasi, Ghana and the Sur de Bolivar region of Colombia.
I do hope the course introduced students to the realities of the finite character of minerals, the failure of companies to promote sustainability, the forced removal of farmers from their land and the failure to compensate with alternative livelihoods.
I hope too that students were introduced to the evidence that while companies stress that gold is essential to computers and other electronics sectors, about 90 per cent of mined gold is potentially available for reuse - but that would disrupt corporate profitability.
Professor Raymond Bush
Centre for African Studies
Reply from Mining, Quarry
and Mineral Engineering staff:
Mining at Leeds is in its 133rd year and has
always sought to provide students with the
knowledge to extract minerals in a responsible
manner. In recent years a project for introducing
ethics more formally into the engineering
curriculum has begun.
As part of this project, in conjunction with the University’s Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), the faculty is working with a wide range of engineering companies, including Anglo American, to develop ethics case studies.
These will be used to help students develop the skills needed to identify, analyse, and respond effectively to the wide range of ethical issues that arise in engineering practice.
The Smallpeice Trust Mining and Mineral Engineering course was one of two taster courses organised by mining staff this year. The courses attracted 45 year 11 and 12 students and were delivered with the assistance of staff from Anglo American, Rio Tinto and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.
Both Anglo and Rio stressed the need for prospective students to understand how necessarily finite mineral extraction is, how future demand can only be met by increased recycling, especially of metals, and how important ethical considerations are.
I noticed on page 10 of the Reporter (July, 527) that daily car parking changes will be increased from £3.50 to £5 a day starting Monday, 1 October. I was astonished to read that the cost of an annual permit will not increase.
University Council document CL/06/71 (19/7/2007) indicates the recommended cost of a 2007-8 standard annual permit will be £247, or about £1.10 a day, based on 225 work days a year. Therefore, a nonpermit holder needing to drive to work on a daily basis, like many permit holders, is being asked to pay an additional £875 a year.
I understand roughly 90% of the available car parking spots on campus are allocated for permit holders while roughly 10% are to accommodate daily rate users. If the move from £3.50 to £5 is an effort to make the daily charges more in line with current market value within Leeds, why wasn’t this same reasoning applied to the effective £1.10 daily rate that permit holders pay?
Why should the decisions on permit holder rates and non-permit holder rates be done in isolation of each other?
Shouldn’t all drivers who make use of the car parks have an equal responsibility to help the University recover the full economic cost of car parking?
Dr David Adolf
School of Physics and Astronomy
I think it is a shame the University has decided to put [daily] parking charges up to £5 per day. This is a 43% increase on the charge to allegedly make parking safer for the parking permit holders that the scheme appears so scared to annoy.
The University’s ‘green policy’ is always used as the excuse for putting up the charges and discouraging car users. But how can this even come into the equation when you offer a much reduced and highly beneficial parking permit scheme to a privileged group of staff who have either been here for a long time or just get the permit because of their position?
New support members of staff on the lowest salaries at the University never have a chance of getting a permit. I work with several members who have been here over seven years and they are still ‘on the waiting list’.
The new reason for this increase in price is that apparently staff would prefer to work from home. Well that would be lovely, but how many support staff can actually do this? The average member of support staff has to come into work every day, and the majority are on salaries well below £18,000 a year. £5 a day parking works out at around £1,100 a year to park on campus, and that’s if they are allowed to park.
The only fair way for parking to go is for everyone to pay the same fee and it is provided on a first come, first served basis with a few exceptions such as staff with disabilities.
[this letter has been abridged for space]
A support staff member
Central Administration
Editor’s note: anonymous letters will not usually be accepted into the Reporter, unless the name is supplied separately. This was not made clear to readers, so we have decided to make an exception in this case.
Reply from Professor John Fisher,
Deputy-Vice-Chancellor, and Robert
Sladdin, director of estates:
This is an emotive issue and there are no
easy answers, as we will never be able to
accommodate all those staff who wish to
park on campus. This is despite the fact that
the University provides far more staff parking
than any other public sector employer in the
city centre.
It’s important to point out that since 2001, the charge for day parking has not increased at the same rate as that of the permits, so the current increase brings them broadly in line.
In 2001, the cost of an annual permit was £102.48 and it’s now £247, so it’s more than doubled. In 2001, the charge for day parking was £2.50 and it’s now £5. Even at the new rates, the level of charges is still well below that of daily parking in the city centre (about £7–£12 per day).
As stated, about 90% of the parking spaces are allocated to permit holders based on the allocation system approved by University Council. The remaining spaces are used to accommodate official visitors.
Due to the diversity of use, there are usually a small number of spaces available for staff without permits. However, it was never the intention for the car park to be used by all staff on a daily basis, 225 working days a year - rather it should be seen as a facility for occasional use, subject to availability.
The University plans to review its parking policy and permit criteria in two years’ time, once we are clear about the city council’s future transport and sustainability policies. There will always be discussions about what the criteria for permits should be, and what the charges should be, so we have tried to be as fair as possible in managing a finite resource.