Legally, UK academics lack tenure...but what does that really mean?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 12--UPDATED

This is useful, from philosopher Michael Otsuka (LSE).   (He tells me it was vetted by employment lawyers.)   One thing he doesn't mention, but is worth noting, is that when tenure was abolished by Thatcher, academic freedom received statutory protection at the same time.  (The protection is more narrow in the UK than the US:  it protects only speech, whether scholarly or in popular media, related to one's scholarly expertise.  But unlike in the US, the protection is by statute.)

UPDATE:  An important clarification from Prof. Saladin Meckled-Garcia (UCL):

Academic freedom in the UK is not actually protected for individuals by statute (in the sense of legislation). It is protected in some institutions by “university statutes”. University statutes are instruments that act like a constitution for certain universities that have Chartered status (granted a Chartered status by the Queen). They can vary across those universities that have them.

The original UK legislation (Education Reform Act 1988) that ended formal tenure in the UK at the same time charged a special body of ‘Commissioners’ to establish universities as charitable entities (‘corporations’) with statutes, and instructed those Commissioners to make sure the statutes paid heed to academic freedom (‘freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom’).

The legislation does not provide a direct protection of that freedom to individual persons whose institutions do not retain statutes with the protection. The ‘Commissioners’ no longer exist as they were a transitional body (in the transition from tenure to statute protections).

Mike’s post was about those institutions that do retain some protection (versus the vast majority that do not because they have removed the statute protections in order to be more “streamlined”—making the changing provisions and protections a matter of policy, more readily changeable than university-statute rights).

Academics in the UK do have free speech rights (under the Human Rights Act 1998) but these do not specify special protections for academics.

When talking about protection of academic freedom in statute in the UK it is always best to clarify this by qualifying this as (some) ‘university statutes’.