King’s College London VC receives HUGE salary increase despite hundreds of university jobs cut

King’s College London (KCL) vice-chancellor and president has seen a salary increase of £42,000, despite the university initiating hundreds of job cuts.

Professor Shitij Kapur, who has been vice-chancellor of the university since June 2021, was paid a salary of £355,000 for the 2024-2025 academic year. This was up by £42,000 from £313,000 the previous year.

Across the year, the university spent £3,602,000 cutting the jobs of 327 employees. In the previous year, £3,602,000 was spent getting rid of 318 jobs.

Although the vice-chancellor’s salary has increased, the university has stressed that Professor Shitij Kapur has seen no net pay increase and that the changes to his salary have been made “to account for the HMRC rules about how accommodation provided to [him] is taxed”.

via Unsplash

The vice-chancellor’s total remuneration for the 2024-2025 academic year reached £446,000.

The total figure includes the vice-chancellor’s £355,000 salary as well as pension contributions of £51,000 down from £54,000 and Kapur’s Maughan Library flat.

This marks an increase of 4.2 per cent from the previous year’s total remuneration of £428,000 for the 2023-2024 academic year.

In comparison to median salaries at King’s for the 2024-2025 financial year, Kapur’s salary is now over 8.2 times the median base pay of staff at King’s and nine times the median total remuneration, up from 7.4 and 8.9 times respectively from 2023-2024.

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Professor Shitij Kapur is not the only vice-chancellor at a major London university that received a salary increase this year. At Queen Mary’s University, Professor Colin Bailey saw a £4,087 salary increase, despite jobs being axed at the university. At Imperial College London, Professor Hugh Brady’s salary was upped by £10,000, and, at University College London, Dr Michael Spence’s salary increased by £11,500.

A King’s College London spokesperson said: “The accommodation has historically been a part of the overall package of the benefits for the Vice Chancellor. The change in the Vice Chancellor’s total remuneration is to account for the HMRC rules about how accommodation provided to Professor Kapur is taxed.

“His salary increase is to allow the Vice-Chancellor to cover the full tax cost personally, rather than King’s paying for it directly as it did previously. The true change in cost for the Vice Chancellor’s salary is the 4.2 per cent rise in his total renumeration. To give further context to this, King’s income and total salary costs both increased by over 8 per cent over the same period”.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Shitij Kapur has been contacted for comment. 

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