Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill before us and welcome him back to the Dispatch Box. We are looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg. I declare previous interests: for 13 years, I was the secretary and academic registrar of what is now Edinburgh Napier University; my wife is a governor of a university in London; and I have two children currently studying at British universities and one who graduated two years ago.

Like many of us here today—I suspect this from looking around—I have been made to reflect by this debate on the changes since I and my brothers went to university in the 1960s. Our fees were paid and we had a full maintenance grant. I could not have gone to university without the changes made after the Robbins report and I am sure that my life would have been very different had I not had that chance. Education has been and always will be a ladder out of social disadvantage.

As we have heard, this is the first higher education Bill for a decade and it is long overdue. Since 2012, our higher education system has been transformed by regulations and orders, but not by primary legislation. The tripling of fees, the introduction of income-contingent tax liabilities—loans, in common parlance—and the ending of maintenance grants were also described as market-driven and aimed at putting students at the heart of the system. This is of course the outcome of relying on the all-too-familiar neoliberal ideology, which places faith in the unregulated free market as the most efficient allocator of resources and which has wealth creation, privatisation, deregulation and individualism as the engines of economic growth. It was interesting that the Minister stressed, rather obviously, that the Bill was a key part of the Conservative manifesto of 2015.

But has the result of these reforms been for the good? We have students leaving university with personal debts of around £50,000 and a large majority of them will not repay their loans in full. We have the most expensive undergraduate courses in the world. There has been a complete collapse in part-time provision and a reduction in home-based postgraduate students. As far as the supply-side reforms are concerned there are indeed a few, mainly London-based, new colleges—it is a very small number—and few of them attract more than a handful of students. How precisely will that raise performance and quality across the whole country?

Most worrying of all is the huge uncovered gap in public finances. According to the recent report of the Educational Policy Institute:

“The contribution of student loans to net government debt is forecast to rise from around 4 per cent of GDP today to over 11 per cent in the 2040s”.

This is no doubt why, almost unbelievably, the Government recently altered the terms of student loans with retrospective effect—a grossly unfair move that we will take up vigorously in later stages.

While we welcome the chance to debate higher education—the high number of speakers who have signed up today is a testament to the interest in the subject in your Lordships’ House—we do not welcome the main thrust of the Bill. The key to our concerns is that the main focus of the Bill is not on promoting scholarship, encouraging research or a concern for truth; rather, it has the goal of turning the UK’s higher education system into an even more competitive market-driven one, at the expense of both quality and the public interest.

Universities have multiple and complex roles in every society across the world, and we all gain from that. They are public institutions serving the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, as well as being the tools of economic progress and social mobility. They use the precious safe harbour of academic freedom to seek truth wherever it is to be found and publish it for all to see. They transmit and project values of openness, tolerance, inquiry and respect for diversity, which are the key to civilisation in an increasingly globalised world. By introducing the practices of reasoned debate, dialogue and discussion, responsible problem-solving and critical thinking, undergraduate education instils democratic habits of thought and action: what Amartya Sen calls “public reason”.

A core mission of our universities has always been to provide their students with skills which will allow them to get jobs and to prosper in business and industry. But it is equally important that universities educate their students to think critically and to engage with the knowledge that comes from scholarship. They must also help them to develop the ability to engage in lifelong learning, which will be so necessary in the labour markets of the future. The academic staff’s engagement with students has many of the attributes of gift relationships, said by Titmuss to be among the most powerful social forces that bind social groups together. It is not a market transaction to be constructed solely around the provisions of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

The regulatory architecture being created by the Bill aims to simplify but it does not. The Office for Students replaces both the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Privy Council, in that it will regulate and fund the sector but also confer degree-awarding powers and university title. In certain cases it will even validate degree-awarding powers itself and, with Ministers, have the power to remove them and the university title, too.

In seeking to create a single body that is both regulator and cheerleader for the sector, the Government seem to be falling into the same problem which bedevilled the BBC Trust. We will argue that there is a case for retaining many of the elements of the current system, with separate bodies focusing on quality, regulation and access. The current system may be cumbersome but it is not broken, and if the Government argue that they would never intervene in ways that would restrict academic freedom, why do they insist on such powers?

We welcome competition, collaboration and new entrants to the sector, but we believe that the bar to entry must be high in order to protect students and the global reputation of the sector. By weakening the conditions to be met by new providers who wish to acquire degree-awarding powers and university title, the Bill risks devaluing our degrees and in turn putting off international students from applying to study here. In any case, surely any new higher education provider awarding its own degrees or calling itself a university must at least meet the same high requirements, over a reasonable period, as existing universities.

Having failed completely to establish price competition with their 2012 reforms, the Government now propose to do so through a flawed teaching excellence framework that measures only a set of proxies for the quality of teaching itself. The Bill compounds the widespread concern the TEF proposals have caused in two ways: by creating a statutory link between teaching quality and the level of fees being charged for that teaching and by making it possible for the Home Office to use the TEF as a quality measure to restrict the number of tier 4 visas it will authorise.

The system of rating universities gold, silver or bronze with the TEF will jeopardise the excellent international reputation of British higher education, which does so much to attract overseas students and extend British influence and soft power abroad. Why rush to introduce an untested system that will create the impression that some universities are failing when they are not?

Finally, there is concern about the research reorganisation proposed in part 3. There should be a stronger requirement for co-operation between the Office for Students and UK Research and Innovation and greater clarity around oversight of the combined education and research portfolio, including postgraduate provision. We are concerned about how Innovate UK will fit into the structure, and we also think that there is a case for stronger safeguards around dual funding and a need for greater guarantees about academic freedom and the Haldane principle.

The Bill has many weaknesses and it also has glaring omissions. Where is the section on part-time provision? Surely it is more important than ever, not least because we have witnessed a fall of some 50% in student numbers since 2010. What about degree-level apprenticeships? We were hoping to see something on credit accumulation and transfer. Where are the links to the FE sector and the new Bill currently in the other place? What about implementing in full the recommendations of the recent report by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury? What about flexible provision of degree courses? There is virtually nothing about taught higher degrees or about postgraduate training and research.

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf said:

“There really are very good reasons why the competitive market is a bad model for the higher education sector”.

This Bill fails to understand the purposes of higher education. If it goes ahead as drafted, it will require existing and any new HE providers to focus on providing courses which emphasise the development of the skills that will lead to employment and pecuniary gain at the expense of all other purposes. Since universities will be rewarded with fee increases and will be allowed to recruit overseas students only if they demonstrate success using inadequate proxies based on predominantly market criteria instead of meaningful measures of academic excellence, the risk is the potential eclipse of the wider social and personal purposes of a university education and a squeeze on research activity. Indeed, it may threaten the very existence of many of our great universities.

We are currently the second most successful HE system in the world, with four universities ranked in the top 10. The sector faces substantial challenges if we go ahead with a hard Brexit, and at the same time we are struggling to retain our market share of overseas students because of the Home Office’s unfounded paranoia about illegal immigration in the sector. The obsession with seeing higher education as a market has distracted Ministers from the negative effects that such an approach has caused. The Government’s 2012 market reforms have managed to deliver fewer graduates at more expense. This does not seem the right time to consider, let alone to drive through, further market-led reforms.