Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Baroness Cohen of Pimlico and Baroness Brinton

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, the autonomy outlined in both this and the previous debate has been one of the guiding stars of our universities in this country for hundreds of years. The balance in their relationship with either the Government of the day or other local interests has been vital. That is why I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, spoke about profit and not-for-profit and why whether a university or institution might be a charity was irrelevant. I spent more than a decade as a Cambridge college bursar and I know many other finance directors of universities. Getting into a debate about charity and about trading arms ends up being a debate about VAT. That is not the business of this House today, but I could bore your Lordships in some detail on that. It is available to most large charities to find mechanisms that allow them to trade, but the big difference is that they then reinvest profits from any trading arm into the charity. That is why I prefer the word “surplus” to “profit”. That has been the guiding star of our university sector for some time.

I was rather taken with the idea put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, of a probationary period. I hope your Lordships will forgive me for coming back to my own experience, but 20 years ago this year, Lucy Cavendish College achieved full college status with its own statutes—which went through the Privy Council—and part of my role in the preceding five years was to ready the college for that and to prove that the college would be here in a hundred years’ time. That included demonstrating the standards that everybody has talked about—making sure that the base finances were solid enough and that access to students and provision of courses met the demands of Cambridge University. The problem for Lucy Cavendish was that it was a 30-year probationary period, but we are talking about the University of Cambridge and perhaps time moves slightly more slowly there than for others. However, the key lesson that the college learned as we prepared for getting our own autonomy was that we had to be able to demonstrate a whole range of standards that would ensure that provision, and then we could accept the responsibilities that come with the autonomy that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, outlined.

I think that the reason that this debate and the debate on the previous amendment have gone on so long is that there is a great fear that in the Bill as outlined, such autonomy is undermined. That is the debate that we need during the passage of this Bill in order to negotiate our way through difficult words such as public and private. I have a slight concern—I would never have described myself at university as being part of the public, but I accept that there was a duty towards the public. It is that language that we need to look at.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I would not have spoken again but for the fact that I should have known the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, had been so heavily involved with Lucy Cavendish, of which I am an honorary fellow and, I hope, partly responsible for its financial stability. One thing is being missed out of this debate on autonomy—it is my fault because I have not mentioned it: we find ourselves heavily constrained by the role of the academic council. We also find the role of our owners and financiers considerably stood off by the role of the academic council. The academic council is a great defence against anybody trying to tell us to do things—not that our owners do that. It stands firm. I am sure that this must be true for other universities. It is an important part of autonomy. We do not seem to have discussed academic councils. Perhaps they will be mentioned later in the Bill.