Merger talks with St Mary’s stall as Heythrop sinks into the red

The future of Heythrop College is in the balance after newly filed accounts reveal the 400-year-old institution is in a precarious financial position while talks over a merger with St Mary’s University seem to have stalled.

Accounts posted last week by the college reveal a £166,000 deficit despite the Society of Jesus increasing its grant to Heythrop to £1.835 million – a 160 per cent rise from last year.

The Jesuits, who founded, run and subsidise the college, have pledged a further £1.6m over the next two years. But the chairman of Heythrop’s Governors, Jeremy Heap, writes that the funding from the Society of Jesus is “time limited” and the college needs to find a “more robust operating model”.

A spokeswoman for the Jesuits said this week: “The order has always supported Heythrop College and has no plans not to continue to support it. The order remains committed to higher education, which may be through a merger or another form of collaboration with St Mary’s.”

Financial pressures are likely to increase on Heythrop next year as the college has decided not to recruit undergraduates for this September. Last year tuition fees (and education contracts) amounted to £3.241m, a significant proportion of the college’s total income of £7.949m.

The accounts show that without investment from the Society of Jesus or St Mary’s University in Twickenham, south-west London, Heythrop is not economically viable.

Discussions about a partnership between Heythrop and St Mary’s, a recently established Catholic university that installed Cardinal Vincent Nichols as its chancellor last week, have been going on since last summer.

Both institutions had said last month they had hoped to get an “agreement in principle” about a merger by the “early summer”. However this timeline now seems to have been pushed back.

A spokesman for St Mary’s explained that the formal talks between the two institutions have not started although discussions with various stakeholders were continuing. A spokesman for Heythrop repeated a statement issued last week saying that the governing body would meet at the end of June to review progress on discussions. St Mary’s governing body will meet on 2 July. 

Along with the subsidy the college pays a peppercorn rent to the Jesuits for use of their site in Kensington Square, in central London, which was purchased by the order from the Religious of the Assumption in 2009 for around £45m.

The society also provides staffing to the college in the form of Jesuit priests who are not paid a competitive salary – this includes the principal, Fr Michael Holman SJ.

A key question for Heythrop, the Jesuits and the negotiations with St Mary’s lies in the future of the Kensington site, now valued at around £100m, with the spokeswoman for the society saying a sale is “not out of the question”.