Finance to the fore
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 12:52:00 BST
Outstanding Finance Team award comes on the back of an OBE for the Director of Service
THE University’s Financial Services department took top honours last night winning the Outstanding Finance Team trophy at the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards 2015.
The awards, now in their seventh year, recognise outstanding leadership and management in the UK’s higher education institutions.
Controlling costs and delivering the resources needed to invest in the future saw the University of Huddersfield win the Outstanding Finance Team category. And the department’s prize comes on the back of the announcement that the Director of Finance, Andrew McConnell, has been awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours just one week earlier.
Huddersfield’s finance team beat five other universities under the banner of being “the UK’s most financially secure mainstream university”.
With Andrew McConnell (pictured left) at the helm, the team has enabled the University of Huddersfield to become one of the few universities in the UK to have no debt whilst concurrently achieving multi-million investment surpluses.
This has enabled the University of Huddersfield to carry out continual investment in major new buildings without going into the red. More than £80 million has been spent over the past eight years and the University has now embarked on a fresh £200 million ‘building-without-borrowing’ programme.
The department could also claim a record of having the highest Higher Education Statistics Agency financial security index and the highest reported historical cost surplus. The team achieved this by creating a culture of financial awareness across the University, generating sufficient cash to meet investment plans without recourse to external borrowing and maintaining financial strength to deal with contingencies.
The judging panel acknowledged the Huddersfield team in helping the University to establish a very stable and robust financial status: “The work the team has done to control the cost base has been very effective and delivered a strong financial result continuously over the past few years. This has given them a position of strength and the capacity to reinvest in future developments.”
The team department collected their award in front of a 1,000 guests at a black-tie event at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, which was hosted by actor and comedian Jack Whitehall.
