Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Report stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, to which my name is attached, but I also echo my noble friend’s remarks on this matter. As I mentioned to the Minister, the rollout will be very important, and the three to five-year assessment of whether the legislation has worked will not serve, because it will be a moving feast. Indeed, I thank the Open University for writing to us to draw our attention to the accounting officer’s assessment, which my noble friend mentioned, which highlights concerns within the department that the rollout might be a problem.

There are two things here, really. First, I seek some clarity on how this will be promoted. This partly echoes the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in Committee, which we rather liked; they were about trust and how this will be sold to people as something that we would want them to take up in the long term. The second point is about addressing the concerns that have been expressed within the department by the accounting officer.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, we have here a fairly formidable list of things, all of them important. I want to focus on subsection (2)(j) in the new clause proposed by Amendment 3, which concerns:

“the financial sustainability of the tertiary education sector”.

We note that student fees have not gone up in all the years they have been there and that universities now face intense financial pressures. I note that, in Committee, the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson, put forward a suggestion that student fees should rise with inflation; that has not gone further but I wonder whether the Minister could give some succour to university vice-chancellors, who are desperately worried about how on earth they can balance their books as costs go up but income does not.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Monday 10th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have also added my name to Amendment 5 in this group.

Currently, the definition of a credit is outlined in Ofqual’s conditions of registration, the Office for Students’ sector-recognised standards and the QAA’s higher education credit framework. It is outlined in the Bill’s Explanatory Notes but not on the face of the Bill. It is important to put it in the Bill to ensure that the Government do not amend the value of a credit without any proper scrutiny. Even though the current Minister committed to the affirmative resolution procedure, there is no ongoing commitment for future Governments. Evidence given to the Bill Committee also set out reasons why a definition should be in the Bill.

It is really important to communicate to a student what a credit means. In essence, a student wants to know a number of things: how much this is going to cost them; what they will have to expend in effort and energy to complete the module; and what they will get for that module and those credits from the institution that they choose to go to. Transparency around the relationship between credits and fees and between credits and module content, including what is expected within that, is very important. Would it not also help anyone whom we want to use the lifelong learning entitlement to understand what their fees translate to in practice?

For a similar reason, I have added my name to Amendment 5, which the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, will address more fully. It is a probing amendment on credit structure. Other institutions have told us that they are on a 20-credit system and so increasing the structure to 30 credits would cause significant disruption, inhibit a quick rollout and be a great disincentive to many learners. There is the argument that short courses are valuable to employers and that putting in a higher credit minimum limits the potential for students’ choice in short courses.

This group has also acquired Amendment 6A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson. We certainly support it. Higher education institutions should be allowed to uprate in line with inflation and this measure should be in the Bill; there would be little incentive for them otherwise.

These are three useful amendments. I beg to move Amendment 2.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 5 in the name of my noble friend Lady Twycross, to which my noble friend Lady Wilcox and I, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, have added our names. It is a probing amendment intended to ensure that modules worth 20 credits or more are included within the lifelong learning entitlement.

We are concerned that there is a series of questions on this that need clarification. The briefing that we have all received from the Association of Colleges also expresses concern about how the credits system will work. It says in its briefing that this is a significant reform and that we need to ensure that credit requirements do not limit access to modular learning, as many providers teach 20-credit modules and a minimum requirement of 30 credits would require learners to bundle together at least two modules to meet the funding requirement.

This issue was discussed in Committee in the Commons, where a similar amendment was tabled to the one that I have put down here to probe this issue further. Since we put our amendment down the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, has tabled his Amendment 6A, which is of great interest. I want to see what the noble Lord has to say about it but, on the face of it, it is the kind of amendment that we would be interested in discussing as we move forward with the Bill.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Report stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments all refer to student unions. We have been concerned about the rather heavy-handed approach to student unions in the Bill. Amendment 16, to which my noble friend Lord Wallace has added his name, seeks to ensure that student unions are fully aware of the regulations with which they must comply. We are particularly concerned in connection with further education student unions, which are likely to be very small and have very few funds available. Presumably they are included in the Bill. The regulations are complex and students will obviously be transitory in post, so simplicity of guidance is essential if they are not to find themselves caught up in unwittingly breaching the rules, as the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has just set out. This amendment would be a very straightforward way of helping students, and it would be very easy to adopt.

Like others, we support the intention of Amendments 11, 15 and 25 but we remain unsure about how they could be implemented. As the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, said, some of these actions may well be criminal behaviour, in which case they do not need to be part of the Bill because they should be something else. I liked the tale told by the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner. There are other ways of dealing with hecklers, and ridicule is often one of the very best. We do not see that these amendments should be in the Bill, but some code of practice or regulation would probably be worth it. However, Amendment 16 is well worth government consideration.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had a thorough exploration of the issues that would face student unions as a result of the passage of the Bill. Amendment 16 in the names of my noble friends Lord Collins and Lord Blunkett and me, with the support of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is not intended to be patronising. It seeks to ask the Government whether they will ensure that the guidance to student unions gives young people all the help and support it can to carry out the duties and responsibilities that the Bill will impose on them. Some of them will be 17, 18 or 19 years old, and this will be something they are absolutely unfamiliar with. That is really all that one needs to say about Amendment 16.

I agree that Amendments 11, 15 and 25 are probably not appropriate for the Bill. As somebody who has been a moderately successful heckler myself, I think they certainly should not be in the Bill.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Committee stage
Monday 14th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire’s contention that Clause 8 should not stand part of the Bill. He is back from his holidays but is speaking at the funeral of a very old friend in Bradford. He is very regretful that he cannot be here with us for the Bill, about which he cares so much.

This amendment harks back to the passionate speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, at Second Reading, in support of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. She was critical in setting it up and said it was doing a decent job. It exists and does a reasonable job of dealing with complaints, but Clause 8 is a complete duplication of bureaucracy. We noted that it was recommended by a Policy Exchange paper, but we do not have to do everything that Policy Exchange tells us to do. This clause will impose considerable additional costs but where are the benefits of this? Surely the Office of the Independent Adjudicator should be able to sort out most of the issues in this clause.

Anyway, universities should be able to manage their own complaints themselves, which most of them do very adequately. Mistakes will of course be made occasionally, but we cannot necessarily assume that state intervention will do better in most cases than the universities themselves. This very lengthy clause, with lots of duplication, is surely not necessary. I am sure my noble friend Lord Wallace would have put it much more passionately, but we simply propose that there is no need for this clause in this Bill.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 61 in the names of my noble friends Lord Collins and Lord Blunkett, and say to the Minister that this group of amendments is striving to make sense out of something. I read this clause several times over the weekend and found it very puzzling and complex. The Minister needs to look at this amendment and the complete complaints procedure again. I am very struck by the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: it imposes costs, but where are the benefits?

The amendment of my noble friend Lord Triesman has tried to impose order on a very confusing clause. It may not be perfect but he is initiating a useful discussion. Every amendment in this group seeks to clarify and modify how the complaints procedure might work. As the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said at the opening of this debate, the complaints procedure is not clear.

My noble friend’s amendment would ensure that free speech complaints are considered alongside other competing freedoms, such as the Equality Act 2010 and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, and that the Government should specify in guidance how that should happen. We have been raising issues around the compatibility of this Bill with those Acts all the way through this discussion and we are raising it again in relation to the complaints procedure.

I will not add any more to that. I think the Minister—the noble Earl or the noble Baroness—will need to address all these amendments, including ours, because, as it stands, this is not a satisfactory clause at all.

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will address the amendments in what is now group 4, commencing with Amendment 18 in my name, which address the various ways in which the board of an ICB should be constituted. I thank the noble Lords who have supported the amendments in my name and will speak also to Amendments 28 and 37.

Amendment 18 covers who should be on the board and, crucially, who should not. These amendments are about the governance of ICBs. They are going to be very powerful bodies—they are already operating in a shadow way, as it were—which will allocate hundreds of millions of pounds of public funds on our behalf. The question is about who should have a seat at the table where the decisions are taken. We should perhaps begin with who should not be on an ICB. There appears to be agreement that private sector interests should not be permitted, so I see no point in repeating the debates that took place in the Commons because that principle has already been settled. However, as ever, the devil is in the detail of how that translates into legislation and the ICB constitutions. It is my belief that what is in the Bill so far is not strong enough.

The objective is that private providers cannot have any part in decisions about how NHS resources are allocated or how contracts are placed. In my other amendments, I have extended the scope of this to ban GPs with APMS contracts, as they are definitely private sector interests. How someone from a social enterprise or the voluntary sector might be regarded is an issue to address sensibly, and I very much welcome that the Minister has said on several occasions that he believes that a margin of flexibility will be needed to make that happen. We all know that there is a single example of someone from Virgin Care being on a non-statutory non-decision-making ICS, one out of the 42 ICBs and one person on a body with 20-odd other members. That is still one too many. It is the principle that matters.

Private providers are bound essentially and legally to be addressing shareholder value, which is absolutely right and as it should be for their particular business interests, but they are not the values that underpin the NHS, which is absolutely not about striving for profit and shareholder value in any way. That is not to say that the NHS at every level should not strive for value for taxpayers’ money and effectiveness, but the best service for patients and communities is surely the underpinning objective of our NHS and it should be that for ICBs. Nor is it saying that the NHS should not be commissioning or working with a variety of providers, but we need to safeguard those values and the social value that underpin the NHS.

In the Commons this has been debated and Ministers are on the record about their intention not to have private providers represented. Sadly, some of us are still sceptical. This is particularly so when one looks at the easing of the 2012 commissioning and procurement regime. I await with interest the Minister’s reply on this matter. In making appointments to ICBs we are clear that there should be some kind of test so that if someone has something in their background which a reasonable person might think makes them unreasonably favourable or disposed to the use of private providers within the NHS, then they have no role on an ICB. I suspect that one might have to see, when the Bill finally takes effect as an Act, that those tests might be brought to bear on some of the ICS/ICB chairs and non-executive directors who may fail it.

The ICBs have similar duties to the CCGs they replace, at least on paper, but the board of an ICB will be very different from the CCG GPs and sometimes, it has to be said, the rather ad hoc arrangements that existed there. ICBs will be much closer to the unitary board model of trusts, FTs and the PCTs of recent memory. We agree with the intention of more effective commissioning of health services in the new era of co-operation and collaboration and with better integration with related services, so there should be a new kind of board made up of fewer NHS insiders and more who may have a wider perspective and fit better into the new model and the aspirations of the Bill.

We have had what feels like a dozen different ways of making commissioning work, and I have been directly involved in some. My observation is that as soon as they look like they are starting to work, they get reorganised. The trouble has always been the split between commissioners and providers, which some may say is essentially bogus. Both bits are still core NHS, and the big trusts have massive influence because they are massive. There is no democratic accountability, and the big providers had all the clout, not the commissioners. The NHS commissioning operation is often in splendid isolation from the rest of the public services, disconnected even from social care, to say nothing of where primary and community care and public health come in. This Bill aspires to be different, so we need to look at how it is served differently by the ICBs.

There has been some pretence that this will all change under the Bill, just as there has been for previous ones on commissioning. ICBs are given flexibilities and can build place-based sublevels, but the reality is that, as they are constructed at the moment, they are the same old NHS cartels. They have all the freedom they are allowed, but they may ultimately be powerless. The public will have as much idea about what ICBs do as they did about CCGs, and we all remember the marches to save our PCTs in the distant past. Just to make this clear, vested interests get a place in the ICB as of right but the public, patients and staff are not given that honour and responsibility. That is what part of these amendments does. Amendment 37, in my name and that of others, sets out our view about which voices are most important, and it breaks the mould of NHS appointing.

I divert briefly to say that elsewhere we will discuss more about how those appointments are made. Our view is that some independent appointments commission ought to make a comeback. I took great encouragement from the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, on Tuesday, which helped in this regard. But there is still far too much control from the top and far too little say from the bottom on all the appointments that will be made under the Bill. Amendment 37 at least offers a way to have some diversity and possibility to challenge the interests that dominate the NHS.

Surely nobody who looks at what the amendments suggest would argue that these interests do not have a right to some voice. The public, patients, staff, social care, public health, mental health—which of these can be safely ignored and which has no part to play? We know the Minister in the Commons gave a minimalist defence in the interests of the new mantra of flexibility. He rightly said that boards should be of a manageable size and that ICBs should have some flexibility—as much as NHS England would allow—to add others to the board, beyond the minimum. The NHS actually has to do what it is told and, unless a more stringent requirement is put in the legislation, it will do what it has always been allowed to do. If we really want a better care system and some change to make organisational upheaval worthwhile, let us have a go at doing something different, with a wider group of voices to be heard and take decisions.

Our Amendment 37 deals with appointing key non-executive board members to represent interests, but within a unitary board. On Tuesday, colleagues pointed out that all board members share collective responsibility, which is a tried and tested model, but we need a discussion about this. I can see from the amendments in this group that other noble Lords have views—my noble friend Lord Bradley and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for example—but our amendments and others in the group, if we discuss them together, would make for a better balanced board, which does not necessarily have to be a larger board. I hope the Minister will consider these submissions carefully. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Masham of Ilton, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Baroness to speak.

Covid-19: Masks

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Thursday 11th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, a speed dating debate such as this one at least ensures brevity. I congratulate noble Lords. There is a theme to the questions: our regret at another issue that exemplifies the Government being slow to act. Is this yet another policy announced without discussion with the devolved Administrations?

Two months ago, Labour backed the Mayor of London’s call for face masks on public transport to be compulsory. Two months ago, we raised the issue of bus drivers needing PPE, and asked whether buses should still run if there is not sufficient PPE. Does the Minister know the answers to these questions, and is he aware of the vulnerability and risk to bus drivers? We must wear masks on public transport from Monday, but who will enforce this policy, and who will help those who forget to bring their masks, forget to put them on, or cannot afford them? We need a comprehensive transport policy, to get our public transport moving, to protect staff and to protect passengers.

[The Deputy Speaker]

My Lords, may I just see whether the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is available before we come to the Minister? No, I think he is not. In that case, I call the Minister.