Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Bragg and Lord Waldegrave of North Hill

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, I declared my interest at Second Reading. I am the most junior member of the club of chancellors mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Myners, as the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Reading. I have a number of concerns about the Bill and without making a Second Reading speech again, I shall look to the Government to strengthen protections against interference with autonomy.

These are not theoretical objections. In this House, we are all in danger of falling into our anecdotage, but I will give just one. I was once the holder of a similar office to the Minister who is so courteously handling this Bill. My Secretary of State was my late friend and former colleague Sir Keith Joseph. The Secretary of State became incensed by the economics teaching at the Open University, so his junior Ministers, Rhodes Boyson and myself, were given the books to read. This had rather extraordinary results. The Open University’s reply to what Sir Keith saw as unfortunate bias in its teaching was made much worse by its defence that there was a book by Mr Peter Walker that in its view provided balance, which did not necessarily help Sir Keith. This was slightly comic and Sir Keith was a man of immense courtesy and deep understanding of the autonomy of the institution, and nothing much further came of it. But in crude hands and in different worlds it could have done. I shall therefore be looking through the course of this Bill to various things that will help us to strengthen autonomy.

My interest in this first clause is whether a definition helps us. Do we need a definition to say what it is we are helping to provide special protection for? I am made a little nervous by my noble friend Lord Willetts’s comments because the reason that things have not been defined in Bills over the years is the danger of a definition excluding things by accident. Very often when we draw a line we find that we have produced a new boundary and that it is better to leave some things a little greyer. In the 19th century, universities probably meant places where there were multiplicities of departments, but we know of very good liberal arts universities in the United States that do not teach science and are perfectly properly described as universities. Other examples were given by my noble friend Lord Willetts.

I am nervous about the clause as it is defined at the moment, but am interested in the Minister’s response. If he can say that he will take it away and think of this problem of definition, I would be happy with that. As drafted, it is not perfect. It would be odd for any small and perhaps specialised university of great distinction in certain areas that the behemoth of the regulator could demand that it was failing because it was not helping overseas markets or something or other, so there is a danger here. I want definitions to be defended. I do not think that we have it quite in this clause, but my support or not for the clause will somewhat depend on the spirit in which the Minister replies and whether he will agree to take this away and work at it to see if something a little more workable can be discovered.

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Stevenson and his colleagues in what promises to be a full-scale and important debate on higher education. It is indeed odd, and even extraordinary, that universities are not mentioned in the Bill. I declare an interest, having been chancellor of Leeds University for the last 16 years.

En passant, I note the spectacularly impressive number of academics of the highest achievement who have expressed serious reservations and opposition to much of the Bill. Surely, in this House more than any other, we believe that the voices of experts, especially of such calibre—many of whom are in this House now—ought to be listened to and recognised as the best wisdom available on the subject.

The Government seem intent on a pincer movement, first introducing free-market rules that could best be described as downmarket options. New colleges called new providers—George Orwell would have loved that—will be able to acquire degree-awarding powers without having to build up a track record by teaching another university’s degree first. None of that boring old research and listening preparation nonsense for this Government, it seems.

The current university system could be called a fine example of the marketplace at its best—there is much talk of the marketplace. There is heavy, open competition for entrance to universities, and heavy competition for lectureships and professorships. When universities put in for grants and funds they realise they are competing with many other universities—sometimes all over the world—and they work out the most competitive as well as the most scholastically satisfactory proposal. This is a marketplace of the mind, but none the less a marketplace and an increasingly key one for the future. Our universities embrace and revel in it.

One of the reasons for this effective balance between learning and earning lies in the autonomy and individuality of our universities. They are not one size fits all, beholden to the state or looking forward to launching themselves on the FTSE 100. They are, to use a phrase of Alan Bennett’s, just “keeping on keeping on” at a high level in different but effective ways, with fertile variations, with their primary purpose: scholarship. As we know, the consequences of scholarship can increasingly be very profitable, wide-ranging across the whole of society and, from the evidence we have, increasingly essential to the success of a 21st-century economy, which, in so many other areas, has found this country wanting. But the heart of it is learning, and the heart of that is the curiosity to pursue knowledge for the sake of more knowledge. Key to that is a certain looseness and confidence in individual and often idiosyncratic needs—private space, in short, for what our greatest scientists and writers in the humanities have always needed to generate their best work. This cannot be legislated for: it is an individual-to-individual decision. This heavy-handed state control is the enemy to that free-ranging condition.

The clamp of the Government’s decision to create a new body—a central control unit—the Office for Students, is anathema to freedom, of which we need more, not less. It would impose another layer of regulation. Goodness knows, universities in this country, like schools, hospitals and the Government themselves, are all but disappearing under the tangleweed of overregulation. Who will run these new bodies, which will interfere so radically in the affairs of the variety of universities? How will they be trained? Where will they come from? How will they know more than those already working hard inside the universities who are the best people? They are already there inside the universities. All of these universities, from the ancient to the relatively new, have built up through expertise and expediency individual and ingenious ways to ride the tide of the times. There is danger of strangulation by bureaucracy.

As they take an increasingly important place in our society as one of the few success stories of the last few decades, universities are being asked to do more, which they are doing. They have now become the forum for disputes about free speech, and it is in universities where unacceptable and destructive racist attitudes must be and will continue to be challenged, I trust. In cities thoughtlessly stripped of traditional industries it is universities that have often provided the new hub of hope in the place.

No doubt others will itemise ways universities can be improved, and I look forward to hearing that. though, we must declare and itemise their current strengths. Universities must be high on the agenda—as high as they are on the ladder of learning in this country. I look forward to the Minister confirming that he will go along with the amendment.