A propos this, philosopher John Dupre writes with an update:

The redundancy project is continuing at Exeter, with at least a heartening level of resistance from staff and the staff union. There is some hope that they will succeed: a lot about the process seems entirely unjustified and of debatable legality.  Please everyone consider signing the petition on change.org.

One particularly cruel and unpleasant aspect of the process might be of interest to readers concerned with game theory. Those at risk of redundancy are faced with the choice of applying for voluntary severance (cooperate) or fill in a form arguing why you are less useless than your colleagues (defect). Applications for voluntary severance close one week before the decisions are made on who actually gets fired. The time from notification that you are playing this game to decision-making, i.e. deciding whether to request voluntary severance, is four weeks.

If you defect you either win the top prize—keep your job—or the worst, get fired with statutory redundancy payment. If you cooperate you get a payment several times the statutory amount. (My own check with the university online calculator suggests this payment would be almost four times as large in my case.) Cooperating also increases the odds for your defecting colleagues of getting the big win, so it has an altruistic element. If no one cooperates the odds of getting the worst outcome are, for philosophers, ~30%. In anthropology it is ~50%. Many aspects of prisoners’ dilemma, but with some nice twists.

As you can imagine, making this decision with no knowledge of the probabilities of the defect outcomes, and when either of the two bad outcomes will, for many people, ruin their lives, is going to be, to put it mildly, stressful.

It would be interesting to know whether this is a common tactic among university managers.