Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan and Lord Stephen

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stephen]

I would argue very strongly that the difference is based on the different policy approaches that the UK Government and the Scottish Government have introduced to the funding of students and tuition fees. I repeat: I do not see that an English, Welsh or Northern Ireland student studying in Scotland is in a different position from that same student studying in their home country. To that extent, they are treated broadly equally.

I would much prefer that we had no tuition fees in universities across the UK, but, in conclusion, I am very pleased that there continue to be no tuition fees for Scottish students in Scotland.

[Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan]

There seems to be a new Scottish excuse running around. It seems to affect Rangers Football Club, the Scottish Football Association and the noble Lord, Lord Stephen: “That was the legal advice we got and it seemed all right at the time”. We as Scots have enjoyed a degree of financial support for a variety of reasons through the Barnett formula from the whole of the United Kingdom. It can be argued that from some of the nations of the United Kingdom there has been a degree of grudging of those payments, but the grudging might well have been set alongside the gratitude for having opportunities to benefit from Scottish institutions—in the case of this evening’s debate, not art galleries, such as the superb ones we now enjoy in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but the universities, which are just as important a part of our social and cultural heritage in the United Kingdom as a whole.

It must be recognised that we are talking here about something that is fundamental to the unity of the United Kingdom. There is access to institutions of higher education on the basis that it is available to all—although financially no longer free, which is an argument for another day. However, three sections of the United Kingdom are being discriminated against, yet the taxpayers within those parts of the United Kingdom are contributing to these institutions.

We have been told this evening of a tsunami of English students coming to Scottish universities—the word “tsunami” sometimes slips far too easily off the tongue; sometimes you forget that it has a “t” at the beginning—but that is probably unlikely. However, we might have a slightly different social composition of the youngsters who would be coming up to Scotland. This is because of the fact that they have to pay fees and that they have to pay what are almost the equivalent of London rental prices for student accommodation in a city such as Edinburgh, where there is tremendous pressure. In addition, as has been suggested, some parents are able to achieve Scottish domiciliary status by a bit of shrewd property investment, which, by the end of the four years their kids have been at the university, will more than repay them for the outlays that they made four years previously.

There is a degree of naivety here. We know that Scottish universities will have to face financial problems. Some of us might have known more about this had we been sent briefing notes, but, perhaps because of some of the speeches that we made in Committee, we were regarded as lost causes and it was decided that we were therefore not to benefit from them. We know that there are financial costs, but these are problems that, were there to be Scottish independence, which I do not want, would have to be confronted the first moment that the union jack came down and whatever it would be for Scotland—whether the lion rampant or the saltire—went up. Of course, this is why the silence from Salmond is so deafening, because he knows that this is the kind of issue that will have to be dealt with. What is more, our great Scottish institutions, which would suffer financially, are suffering already because of the manner in which the funding arrangements have been arrived at. We know that they are not getting the resources that they require.

If this were just a question of finance, resource and discrimination, we could have debates about that, but there is an irony here. Not every youngster who is Scottish and pursuing a degree-level course gets free education. If a youngster attends a further education college and is doing a level 5 or 6 technical qualification, which is to all intents and purposes equivalent to a degree, they have to pay their fees. Their fees are not paid from the largesse of the Scottish Government. There is no social justice to people having to pay to pursue vocational courses that, as some would argue, are even more valuable for the lifeblood of the Scottish economy than perhaps some other courses that are rather more interesting but not necessarily more economically relevant in the immediate short term.

I make that point because there is an inconsistency here—inconsistencies have been identified in a number of categories this evening. We may simply accept the argument that this is an example of gross discrimination, which is basically unfair and which is unsettling for the United Kingdom, and that it would be in everyone’s interests to look towards a renegotiation of the settlement. We are not arguing that universities be bankrupted overnight. We are not suggesting that they be swamped with students coming northward—students who, from what we can gather, would be coming not in buses but in their own sports cars and the like. All we are saying is that we have an opportunity this evening to confront an issue that threatens the unity of this kingdom. It requires us to look afresh and to use far more ingenuity rather than bureaucratic complaints or concerns about legal advice that may or may not have been appropriate at the time. We now have to recognise that within a different political context we need to have a degree of agility that involves negotiation and understanding on both sides. This amendment this evening would go no small way towards trying to achieve that.