Higher Education: EUC Report

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, in June 2011 my company, Cobra Beer, signed a joint venture with Molsen Coors, one of the world’s largest brewers in India, to build on the global joint venture that we had already formed in 2009. Molsen Coors and Cobra Beers in India bought the only brewery in the state of Bihar. In the past year, I have got to know more about Bihar’s history. It is the state where Buddha started Buddhism. It is where one of the most powerful ancient empires under the emperor Ashoka, the Mauryan empire, was based. It is where one of the world’s most famous ancient universities, Nalanda, was founded around the fifth century AD and was closed in 1197AD. Nalanda was closing down when Oxford and Cambridge were starting. We in Europe are fortunate to have a host of ancient universities, including Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford and Cambridge, and I could go on. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Young, for leading this debate.

Where Europe in concerned, Britain is a proud member of the EU. Yet there is always the debate about “Are we in Britain contributing more to Europe than we are getting out of it? Is European governance, regulation and red tape stifling or hampering Britain or is it helping to improve Britain? Is our trade too dependent on Europe, when the world’s centre of gravity is moving east and south?”.

Fortunately, we made the right decision to stay out of the euro. To me, the eurozone crisis shows that pushing towards a united states of Europe is a bridge too far. The euro has proven itself to be an abject failure where one size cannot fit all and a group of countries in Europe can never be in sync at the same time, and thus should never be straitjacketed by a single exchange rate and a single currency. That can work only if you have a true political, fiscal, financial and economic union with a central defence and a central foreign service such as the federal systems in the United States of America or a country like India. I believe that that will never happen in Europe. It is a utopian dream to anyone who thinks that it will. Given this, in Europe, where higher education is concerned, on the face of it there appears to be the right balance in encouraging interaction between European universities, movement of students between countries and funding of research around the EU. Some of these things are handled by the EU directly, but others, most notably the Bologna process, operate outside the EU, and involve both EU and non-EU countries.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, Britain has some of the best higher education in the world and it is one of our greatest sources of soft power. As many noble Lords have said, we are fortunate to have the best higher education in the world alongside the United States. I do not think that we need another ranking system, which has been mooted. We have got enough rankings of universities but whichever ranking you look at we in Britain are right up there at the top. Yet that is in spite of our higher education funding being a fraction as a proportion of GDP compared to our competitors in the United States and on the continent.

My figures are slightly different from those given by the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman. We spend 1.3% of GDP on higher education compared to 3.1% in America and an EU median of 2.6%. We spend exactly half a percentage of GDP on higher education as the median European figure and far less than the United States of America. Given this, the Government were short-sighted and irresponsible in cutting higher education funding and teaching funding by up to 80%, thus forcing universities to almost treble their students’ tuition fees in one go.

We are shooting ourselves in the foot and this is deterring students, both domestic and from the EU. Our domestic students will be burdened with loans for up to 30 years. Will the Minister confirm the financial arrangements—this issue has been raised—that are available to EU students attending British universities? Will she give us the number of EU students who applied to British universities for the 2012-13 academic year versus the number who applied for 2011-12? Will she also confirm the actual number of EU students who enrolled in this academic year compared with the previous year?

We have a huge advantage with the English language being the world’s global language. Not only do we have the reputation for having the best universities in the world but we also know that EU students want to come here to enhance their English skills at UK universities—something that they know is essential around the world. In the state of Bihar, the chief Minister told me something that I would never have heard in India some years ago—that children in his state wanted to learn English, and that the teachers needed to be able to learn it to teach it to the students because it was the international language. The internet has only enhanced this.

On the other hand—and on this I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins—we must continue to encourage our students to learn foreign languages, and in particular European languages such as Spanish and French that are spoken so widely around the world. The Erasmus scheme must be encouraged among UK students, but we languish at the bottom of the list among the large EU countries in terms of outgoing Erasmus students. What are the Government doing to try to get us higher up this list? What are they doing to encourage the Erasmus scheme to be more flexible? The average time spent is about six months. Could students not be encouraged to spend a term, or just a few months?

Then there is the area of R and D, which the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, spoke about. We are so underfunded as a country. We need European Union funding; in Britain we spend 1.7% of our GDP on research and development, compared with an EU median of 2%—let alone countries like Germany, which spends 2.8% and the United States, which spends 2.7%. Are the Government doing enough to ensure that the Horizon 2020 figure of €80 billion will be maintained, even if other parts of the Commission budget must fall?

I wrote a foreword for a book called Big Ideas for the Future, produced by Universities UK and Research Councils UK. In spite of our underfunding in research and development, we have 200 examples in that publication of innovations coming out of British universities that are world-beating and world-changing. We are doing this, and the Chancellor is asking for the EU budget to be cut—although that is understandable. But can the Minister confirm that the EU R and D budget is not to be cut and that we will stick to the Horizon 2020 plan of €80 billion, if not the €100 billion suggested by the European Parliament committee?

On the business interaction with universities that is talked about, are we using Cambridge as an example of a cluster? There are three great university clusters in the world. One is Silicon Valley, which is head and shoulders above the rest. Then we have the Cambridge, Boston cluster, with MIT, and the cluster with Cambridge University here, which is one of the best in the world. What are we doing to encourage this around Europe? The report does not really talk about this.

Furthermore, what are the Government doing to encourage the European Union to have a strategy to attract students from around the world, working in a co-ordinated manner to market European universities to developing countries and the emerging markets? Could we have flexible degrees, where a student from India could come for a degree to the UK but spend a year of that degree at one or more European universities as part of their course? We are competing, as Europe, with Australia, Canada and the United States of America.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, this Government continue to insist on including student figures within immigration figures. I have challenged the Home Secretary on this and I am told that we are using internationally recognised figures. That is not the case. Could the Minister confirm that countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States of America all include student figures as a separate category from immigration figures? The signal that we are sending out is awful. I am on the board of three business schools and I know that our applicants from countries such as India have plummeted. Students in India are asking, “Does Britain want us?”.

Then we had the situation at London Metropolitan University. That was a shocking incident, with the UK Border Agency having the gall to take the licence away from a university. I could challenge the UK Border Agency and say, “Tell me the number of illegal immigrants in this country”, and it would not be able to give me a figure. Even when it finds them, they cannot deport them. Yes, we need to address bogus universities and colleges and yes, we need to address bogus students—but what about the innocent students among the 2,500 at LMU who had done nothing wrong and were told that they had 60 days to find another course? Are we a police state? Is this the way to behave? The signal that we have sent out around the world once again is that Britain does not want foreign students—the students who bring in £8 billion of revenue to this country and build generational links around the world. Three generations of my family have been educated in this country. I want that to go on and on. Will the Government address this situation and redress this gross unfairness and injustice?

We are now competing with the rising powers of China and India. Britain and the European Union will compete and stay ahead only by ensuring that our higher education, research and development and innovation always lead the way. We cannot cut back on this funding now. The Government have not only cut back on HE funding but have cut back on R and D in real terms by freezing the funding of science and research. Will the Government confirm that they have frozen science and research funding? Will they admit that they are cutting it back in real terms? If we do not put higher education and research and development at the top of the agenda in Europe, we will not get ahead and we will be left behind. Britain is head and shoulders above our European counterparts in higher education. We should be leading the way for Europe to be able to compete in the decades ahead with the emerging countries, particularly the giants of China and India.