Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Blackstone and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak very briefly at what I assume is getting towards the end of an interesting debate. What worries Members of this House most about the Bill are the clauses about new providers, and my noble friend Lady Warwick made this very clear in her excellent speech. We have a system of higher education in this country that is highly regarded all over the world. We have many great universities from the point of view of research but we also have many great universities from the point of view of the quality of their teaching and the advanced vocational training that they provide. We do not want this great system undermined by too easily recognising new institutions and giving them degree-awarding powers before they have been through a proper probationary period, in which they are associated with existing institutions that will support their development and growth and help them gain the capacity to become institutions of higher education that we can recognise, embrace and support. That is at the centre of the concerns that have led to a wish to place at the front of the Bill a set of propositions about what constitutes not just a good university but a good system of higher education.

The other point I want to make is that for many, many decades, higher education has embraced not only universities but many other kinds of institution. Some of what has been said when discussing the question of whether or not universities should cover a wide range of disciplines has not quite taken into account the fact that there are specialist institutions that have for a long time, as I have said, not been defined as universities. In some ways, I think we may have made a mistake in deciding that some of these specialist institutions should now be called universities. Looking back, we see that colleges of education, medical schools, music conservatoires, specialist arts colleges and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned, the Royal Agricultural College, were not defined as universities but as being part of a system of higher education. We might be able to bring some new specialist institutions in, but they should not necessarily—at least not at the beginning of their existence—be called universities.

Most people understand that the concept of a university covers a range of disciplines, allows academics to mix with colleagues from a wide range of subjects and allows students to work not just with those studying exactly the same subjects as themselves but with students studying a wide range of subjects.

There is, in a sense, a bit of a contradiction in this legislation. One principle of all good legislation is that it should be internally consistent and its parts make up the whole in a way that is appropriate and easily understood. On the one hand, Part 3 of the Bill is asking for an umbrella body—UKRI, which would cover all areas of research—in order, we are told, to ensure that there is cross-disciplinary research rather than researchers being in separate little boxes not communicating with each other. That is what good universities do. They are institutions that look at a particular intellectual problem from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives and try to solve that problem. That is why some of the institutions that I mentioned earlier are to me higher education institutions, but they are not universities as normally understood.

To pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said a little earlier, what we should be doing now is not to try to define what a university is, because this Bill should not just be about universities. They are the main provider of higher education, but they may not be the sole providers. Rather we should start with something that sets out what the principles of good, strong, high-quality higher education should be. Of course, that should cover institutional autonomy, freedom of expression, academic freedom and a whole variety of other things that are mentioned in the amendment. But the way in which it has been framed at the moment leads to a certain concern that it is not definitionally perfect.

Will the Minister consider coming back to the House with a new amendment to start this Bill off that covers the sort of issues in the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Stevenson, and Cross-Bench and Liberal Democrat supporters? That would reassure us a little that the Government are concerned about these principles and will not rush into a set of legislative changes that will undermine the quality of our higher education system by bringing in new providers that will not meet these principles.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

I speak as a lawyer, not as an academic. Indeed, until recently I thought that I was the only Member of the House who has not ever been a governor, chancellor or vice-chancellor of one of these institutions. As my noble friend Lady Wolf has now twice explained, the only direct relevance of this proposed new clause goes to the title of the body in question. In short, it goes only to Clauses 51 to 55 of the Bill. I understand her concern to be with regard to bodies being allowed to be called universities. Effect would be given to that if one said at the start of this new proposed clause: “For the purposes of Clauses 51 to 55, a higher education institution”—because that is what the whole of the rest of the Bill is about, assiduously avoiding any distinction between universities and those such bodies that are not—“should be regarded as entitled to use the title of university if it is an autonomous institution”, to return to the language of Amendment 1, et cetera.

With the best will in the world, although it seems to be the opinion of many in the House that the amendment will affect the view generally as to the autonomous nature of these institutions, as drafted it will not. It goes only to the title. It does not go even to the degree-awarding powers. That has nothing to do with whether a body is or is not called a university. Therefore it is much more appropriate, when concerned not with the title but with the autonomy of these higher educational institutions, to look at the amendments to which others have referred, Amendments 65 and 165, which deal not only with universities but with all higher education institutions.

If we want to give universities some special status, which this Bill as drafted at the moment assiduously does not, we have to recast the thing as a whole and say, “If you are a university, not only will you be able to call yourself such but these consequences follow”.