Higher Education (Basic Amount) (England) Regulations 2010

Debate between Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon and Lord Winston

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I am in a rather unusual position of representing four universities. I am chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, which is a new university that contributes hugely to the local economy and teaches people who would not normally in the past have had an ambition to go to university. I am chairman of the Royal College of Music, which is a specialist conservatoire, representing an entirely different skill base. I am a professor at Imperial College, London, which is one of the world’s top 10 universities and is research-rich. I am also on the council of Surrey University, which has aspirations and an extraordinary portfolio that extends from the area of public services right through to nuclear physics, and is increasingly engaged in excellent research.

Because of time, I want to make two brief points. It is very unwise to think of universities as one body. The point about my portfolio and the thing that all those universities have in common is that each is entirely different. There are special problems, for example, in the conservatoires. If we lose the exceptional funding for them, there will be an unparalleled crisis in the arts that we have not seen before. There is much in the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, that is worthy of serious consideration and is clearly very clever. However, much more time is needed to allow the issues between the different areas that we need to look at to be considered.

It is also true that increasing the fees will make the specialist conservatoires increasingly elitist, and we will end up with increasing numbers of Chinese students—excellent though they are—and poorer British students will not be able to study music, for example. It is also worth bearing in mind that 85 per cent of musicians probably do not earn £21,000 a year through music, even at the height of their powers. Will they be paying back fees for some other skill which was not developed in the higher education system?

The other brief point that I want to make is the question that I raised with the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, at the very beginning—on the day that the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, were first debated in this House. I said that, as I spoke, students in Sheffield were walking the streets protesting at the increased higher education fees. They did not understand what was going on, and I asked the noble Baroness how the Government intended to engage with the students. The Government have still not engaged with the students. This is a highly dangerous situation. This is a very complex measure and the idea of having this vote on fees before we have seen the White Paper is nonsense. It is not good government, and I have to say to the Government that it may be extremely dangerous to the coalition if they insist on driving this through.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, it seems to me that those of us on this side of the House who will vote in favour of the Government’s proposals have to answer four questions. The first is directed—fairly or unfairly, you may think—particularly at the Liberal Democrats, and was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Patten: “Why do you not honour your election pledges?”. Let us put it in the stronger terms used outside this place: “Why are you betraying the promise that you made to us?”. Let us for a moment examine that promise. It was a promise that if there was a Liberal Democrat Government, we would then seek to get rid of tuition fees. Whether that policy was wise for my party is a different matter. When I was its leader, I tried to persuade my party out of that policy in 1998, but I signally failed in a democratic party. That policy was democratically arrived at. However, the truth is, I am sad to say, that there is not a Liberal Democrat Government—there is a coalition Government. In order to put that Government together, we had to come to compromise deals with another party, which gave us some of the things we wanted and some of the things which we did not want. How else could you put a coalition deal together?