Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Morris of Yardley and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Report stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I will move Amendment 11 and speak to Amendments 15 and 25, alongside my noble friend Baroness Morris. I also want to speak in support of Amendment 16, being moved by my noble friend Lord Collins. We will shortly come to a very important debate on Clause 4. It seems to me, whatever the outcome of that debate, that at the end of the day and at the heart of the Bill, we are trying to encourage behaviour in our universities which will ensure the freedom of speech that noble Lords have spoken about. I think that it is the codes of practice that will have a pivotal role in ensuring that, backed up by whatever sanctions we eventually decide are necessary, whether we have Clause 4 or not.

I will focus on the codes of practice that each university—and each student union—has to agree to. The OfS is enabled to ensure that those codes of practice are acceptable within the terms of its overseeing of university registration and that they are appropriate to each student union as well. The OfS has a responsibility in the Bill—I think it is a very good responsibility—to publish good-practice advice. I see this as a wholly constructive approach, encouraging the best behaviour you can expect within those institutions.

The concern that my noble friend and I raised in Committee was the extent to which academics and speakers can expect protection in the face of action that is designed to intimidate them and prevent them speaking. We know from the experience of a number of academics—in particular women academics—that such intimidatory action can take the form of open letters demanding that an academic be sacked, vexatious complaints, petitions to publishers demanding that work be withdrawn, campaigns of defamation, smears, demands to prevent an academic being platformed, attempts to prevent events going ahead by threatening trouble if they do, and disrupting events that do go ahead. As I said, the targets of these tactics typically are women academics.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, whom I respect enormously, “Where have you been?”, when there has been such trouble for some academics on many of our campuses. We cannot sweep that under the carpet; it is a reality. Professor Kathleen Stock suffered horrific abuse and her university completely failed to defend her until almost the last moment. That was a graphic demonstration of why this legislation in the end is required.

I was very grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for meeting us to discuss this. What he essentially said, if I may paraphrase it, is that the Bill will protect the right of speakers to put forward controversial or unpopular ideas, and that it will also protect the right of those who do not agree with them to speak up. I absolutely agree with that. But it should not mean that higher education institutes should simply stand passively by while, for instance, hecklers attempt to disrupt planned events that are lawful.

I have seen it argued that such attempts to silence speakers are themselves a form of free speech. But I think that that confuses the right to protest with the right to silence others. Speech that is intended merely to silence the speech of others, far from contributing to knowledge and learning, surely narrows the scope of the educational sphere.

The amendments we have put forward try to make it explicit that the codes of practice of universities and student unions must cover the measures that must be taken to ensure that a person is not prevented from speaking by attempts to drown them out or silence them. They have become known as the “hecklers’ amendments”.

I would like some assurance from the noble Earl that the OfS in its responsibility for the continued registration of universities and in its oversight and monitoring of student unions will give its attention to this matter and that it understands that the issue will be very important to the success of the Bill. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support this amendment, to which I have added my name. I will try not to repeat everything that my noble friend Lord Hunt said but will emphasise some of his points.

I too was grateful for the meeting with the Minister. It was very helpful, and I think there was a great understanding of our view and of the problems the Government are having with putting this into legislation. I completely accept that the law has to protect both those who wish to express a view and those who wish to express a contrary view. In some ways, as my noble friend said, this is a “hecklers’ amendment”, but we are old enough both to have done some heckling and to have been the subject of heckling in past years. However, most of the time I was heckling or being heckled, it was not with the intent of stopping somebody else being heard; that is the crucial point.

Universities should be places where there is freedom to put forward a view and freedom to oppose it. I would never want a law of silence, where somebody’s view has to be listened to in silence. If there is an intention to make sure that the opposite point of view, which is legally held, is not heard, that is not the purpose of universities in this country. It never has been and it never should be. There are too many examples of that border being crossed.

Professor Stock has received a lot of publicity and rightly so—she felt obliged to lose her job. However, I have worked with academics who express an interest in sex and gender, and maintain the view that sex is a biological thing and that that should govern the law, and their lives have been made a misery. It is a long time since I have been to a university and talked to academics expressing that view when they have not told stories about it being miserable to be an academic because there is not the environment in which they can openly express their views. They are not people who want to impose an alternative point of view; the idea of putting forward a view is to engage in debate, not to make others say, “Yes, you’re right. Let’s move on.” Engaging in debate is at threat.

I can see that it is difficult to put that into law. It would be impossible; we would be here all day. I hope that putting this into the code of practice gives a clear message to the leaders of our universities that they have to take action, because, quite frankly, some vice-chancellors have not been doing their job on this. They have hidden quietly for too long and not stood up to protect their academic colleagues when they should have done. If that message can go forward in the code of practice, we might begin to reverse this tide.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Morris of Yardley and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not yet heard anything I disagree with, so I shall try to make some different points. This is an odd, strange Bill. On the face of it, there is not a lot in it; however, the issues it addresses are of prime importance. There is nothing more important than the future structure of our school system. Otherwise, we keep revisiting it and do not do the things we really want to.

A lot of us here, especially those of us who have had the honour of having ministerial responsibility, would like to take this opportunity to put the structures behind us and get on with what really makes the difference: what happens in the classroom and outside the school, and the relationship with a whole range of children’s services. On one level, I welcome this opportunity and the Government’s intention to sort out the structures, because I do not like the fragmented, dual system: it is a waste and builds up bureaucracy. There is so much good will to sort it out that I am not quite sure how the Government have managed to mess it up as much as they have.

I find two things odd about the Bill. One is the broad range of powers the Government are taking—the way they are trying to solve this problem. The second is that it is really difficult to table amendments to it. I had a discussion with my Front-Bench colleagues yesterday about the detail of some of the amendments tabled. I asked, “Why have you put that down?” They explained very clearly that that was the only way we could get the debate going. The Bill is not written with a sensible structure—a clear vision, objectives and a means to achieve them: the Government’s clear thinking—which, as my noble friend Lord Knight said, we could amend. All it says is that the Government will take powers on anything they want. It is really tough to amend that, because it does not give the criteria against which they will judge whether to take powers, or what they will do with the powers they take. There is nothing to amend because it is all about the future. That is why the report from the Delegated Powers Committee is critical. There is nothing to discuss because the Government are not saying what they will do.

Therefore, I come to the conclusion—I do not often say this, and I say it in a very mellow tone—that they really ought to withdraw the Bill and think again. That is not to score a political point. The Government’s wish to make this coherent is laudable, and I should like to be with them on that and to have a really good debate on the things we disagree on and on which we agree, but we cannot, given the structure of the Bill.

There is a risk that we will miss the enormity of the changes because of the breadth of the Bill and because it does not spell out what it is doing. I am not saying that that is deliberate—it may be, but I am giving the Government the benefit of the doubt. It talks about academies, but in reality we are talking about every single school in our country. If the proposals in the White Paper are enacted and every school becomes an academy, the Bill will make changes not just to the 47% or 48% of schools that are academies; it is a blueprint for every school in our country.

If you look at the White Paper, there seems to be a wish to have every school as an academy by 2030. I want something better than that. I want to know whether the Government are going to do anything if that does not happen naturally by 2030, because it is important that we know whether that is what we are talking about. I do not want anyone to have to revisit this legal structure in five or six years’ time; that would be a waste of effort.

We are not really talking about academies because, if you look at some of the examples given, the powers that are going to go the Secretary of State are absolutely with academies currently, not the Secretary of State. Although the Bill talks about

“powers in relation to Academies”

and it is claimed that all the Government are doing is putting in law what is in the agreement, with respect, that is not the case. Looking down the list—I had only a quick look; I did not do any checking—I spotted five things. I would suggest that the curriculum, the length of the school day, the appointment of staff, the remuneration of staff and the admissions code are all freedoms that were given to academies but are not available to maintained schools. I am not saying whether I think that is right or wrong, but this clause takes all those freedoms away from academies and gives them to the Secretary of State. So this is no longer about academies. You can use that word but it will not mean an academy in the way we have known it if this Bill becomes law.

The Bill will also affect maintained schools, but they will not be maintained schools in the way we have understood them if it becomes law. At the moment, maintained schools have a relationship with the local authority. They will not have that relationship if the Bill becomes law, but it does not say anything about what the local authority’s relationship with any of these schools will be. That is what I find confusing because, essentially, the Bill sets up a structure for a school system that is neither an academy nor a maintained school in the way we understand them, but a new type of school that is part of a nationalised school system, with all direction, powers and control coming from the Secretary of State, with the local authority having some involvement in special needs and the interests of children, and with the freedoms that were formerly given to academies no longer there.

I am not saying whether that is good or bad—in my view, some of it is good and some of it bad, and I want a debate—but this is no way to change the school system. These changes are enormous. They overturn the work of Michael Gove and other previous Conservative Ministers, as well as that of my noble friend Lord Adonis and other previous Labour Ministers. One of them is sitting behind me; I suspect that others will join in. So I say to the Minister on this set of amendments —my noble friend Lord Knight put it very well—that we want the debate as well. It would be better for our country and the system if the Minister took this Bill back, as we need pre-legislative scrutiny of it, and came back in due course with a structure that will enable us to debate all these things.

If we were to set up a school structure that is neither an academy nor maintained, I would be very happy about that. I would like to put those old rows and debates behind me. If we have not learned something from both those things over the past 20 years, we need our heads examining. We could spend two years thinking up a name for it—I do not mind—but I cannot do that with this Bill. It is not written in a way that makes it possible to amend it in that form. Yet it is no more and no less than an attempt to set up a blueprint for a brand new structure of schools in this country. I really do hope that the Minister will volunteer to do this in a different way.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I follow two such experts in education on these Benches. However, I see an uncanny parallel with what has happened in the health service, which I know a little about, and education. At about the same time that my noble friend Lord Adonis was proposing academies, in the then Department of Health we were proposing the creation of foundation trusts. The idea of NHS foundation trusts was to get out of the kind of micromanagement that the report today on the NHS talks about, and to give much more control locally, making those foundation trusts which were going to be the best performers much more accountable to local membership and to the population.

However, after the initial enthusiasm of my good friend Alan Milburn and the team of Ministers then, the normal centralising powers of the Department of Heath took over. Gradually, it has assumed more and more control again over those individual trusts. Now there is virtually no difference between a foundation trust and a non-foundation trust. Listening to my noble friends, I think that there is an uncanny parallel where essentially the Secretary of State for Education is giving himself the tools to have direct responsibility for each school within the system.

My ministerial experience of trying to run the NHS, where we had 300 bodies accountable to us, is that this will not end happily. Do Ministers realise that they will have to answer here for the performance of each individual school? Do they realise the enormity of that task? It then brings us to the problem that we have: that this Bill is ill timed because the department have not thought it through. Whatever our view on academies—there is a somewhat mixed view, on these Benches at least—there is general agreement that it is right for the Secretary of State to set some standards for our school system, and that there must be much more coherence in the system.

I was very struck by the pretty dispassionate report by the Institute for Government three or four months ago on academies, in which it makes the point that, with academies now making up almost 50% of all schools, we have a very inefficient dual system. Local authorities must still support a diminishing number of schools with declining resources, and the regulatory system for academies is incoherent, with financial regulations split from performance management and no single person or office in the system able to hold multi-academy trusts accountable for poor educational performance. The institute then says it is no wonder that far too many multi-academy trusts do not add value to the schools within their control.

The Minister referred at Second Reading to the accountability system and the ability of her department and its officials to hold the system to account. She said that Ministers were launching a review to establish the appropriate model and options for how best to regulate the English school system. Why on earth does she not do the review, see what the outcomes are, then bring legislation to your Lordships’ House and let us properly debate and seek to amend it? I urge her to listen to my noble friends and take this Bill back, or at least to pause it to allow for more work to be done and for us to have proper scrutiny of this vital legislation.