Policy for funding promotions and exceptional contribution awards for externally funded staff
In order to ensure greater consistency between the funding of promotions and exceptional contribution awards for core and externally funded staff the following has been agreed by the Pay and Reward Review Group.
The University should create a provision to underwrite the additional costs arising from the award of ECAs or promotions to externally funded staff that cannot be funded from the project budget.
The cost of the ECA and/or promotion should be charged to the project account in the first instance and the project investigator should endeavour, as far as is possible without jeopardising the research itself, to mitigate the additional cost from within the project budget. This may include requesting additional funding from the sponsor where the sponsor is willing to pay for the additional costs.
Where it has not been possible to mitigate the additional cost from within the project budget it will result in an overspend against the direct cost budget of the project. This will be identified when the project is completed and, to the extent that the overspend can be attributed to the ECA or promotion, the overspend will be transferred as a charge against the University's central provision.
The costs that are charged against the central provision will form part of the 'indirect cost' of research and will therefore be included in calculating the indirect cost rate used when undertaking FEC costings. In this way the University will ensure that it has the opportunity to recover all of its costs.
The Pay & Reward Review Group has agreed this policy which has been communicated to departments and was implemented in relation to the Promotion/ECA round in 2006.
March 2007