Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, there can surely be no doubt about the timeliness—indeed, the urgency—of a debate on higher education, as the facts flow in of universities in financial trouble, of the lack of value of a university education, of universities being pushed towards unwanted mergers, and of the impact of the Government’s immigration policies on universities. There can be no better person to lead this debate than my noble friend Lady Deech, whose career in higher education has been so outstanding—although I warn the House that the line I will take on international students is a bit different from hers. Let us hope, therefore, that those with responsibility for universities in the new Government will read this debate and give it due weight, as they move towards decisions that cannot be made without damage being done to a sector of our economy that really matters to its future health and growth.

Any analysis of the higher education sector in this country could surely not escape the conclusion that it is potentially highly positive to our economy. After all, we do not have that many sectors of our economy where we stand second in the global rankings, behind only the United States, nor many where the benefits to such a wide spread of our economy, including often being the principal employer in relatively small towns and cities, are so marked.

You might expect such an economic treasure to be nurtured and promoted by the Governments of whichever party. If we had an industrial sector that had such characteristics, you can be sure that it would be treated like the crown jewels, but higher education is not. Instead, the Government’s immigration policies seem designed to damage the highly valuable contribution that foreign students make to our financial health and to our subsequent influence worldwide. The system for making loans to students for their tuition fees is manipulated to charge punitive levels of interest, which remain a burden on students for most of their lives. This would be hardly credible if it were not happening before our eyes.

I welcome the fact that the Government seem, belatedly, to have woken up to the immigration problem and to be planning to introduce in the autumn a new immigration channel for universities. I hope that the Minister, in replying to the debate, will supply some of the details missing so far from the initial announcement and that these will measure up to the damage already done.

Then there is the value of a university education to its recipients and our economy overall. I made myself rather unpopular many years ago when I asked the then Minister responsible on the Front Bench in your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, who was announcing the target of 50% of our population to receive a university education, whether it was not wise to be able to answer the question of what the benefit to our economy was before announcing any target. Now, the question is being posed, rather haphazardly, and we still do not have an answer.

I hesitate to conclude these remarks with a call for another full-scale inquiry into the higher education sector, and I will not do so. But there are quite a lot of questions that need answering, and I hope that they will soon be answered, because the country is now putting at risk one of its greater assets, albeit doing so inadvertently.