Higher Education: Financial Pressures

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, none of us has felt the need to declare our interests, but I will declare a family interest as both of my children are currently working in research-intensive universities in this country, and both have been offered salaries considerably greater than they are currently earning. My son, who leads a systems biology laboratory at a Russell group university, is working in one of this country’s strategically important STEM areas. He came back from the United States after 10 years there on a Marie Curie scholarship—a European Union scheme that encourages researchers in North America to come back to Europe, and which, of course, no longer exists in Britain. He has had a series of temporary contracts and has just, at the age of 41, been offered a long-term contract. But he is still earning slightly less than what I understand most train drivers are earning. A hedge fund with quite close associations with a major donor to the Conservative Party offered him several times this salary some months ago—which was, naturally, a little tempting.

We should not assume that the situation in British universities can be maintained for very long. Some Members may have seen the article in the latest Times Higher Education supplement which suggests that Britain’s reputation as a science superpower is very shaky. It quotes Douglas Kell, the former executive chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council:

“Funding has dropped in real terms”


for research in STEM subjects

“by 60 per cent since 2009”.

It adds that, if you look at the data on who is producing the best scientific papers, the argument that UK science is so much better than European science, so we can look to partner with Asian and American institutions instead, is rather shaky too. Therefore, we should not take our current situation for granted.

I was shaken some months ago after talking to one of the younger colleagues with whom I used to work. He had moved from Oxford to Berlin because, he said, the institutions he now works with in Berlin are more intellectually rigorous and more pleasant to work in. That is worrying.

There are two narratives about UK universities that one hears from the Government and the Conservative Party. The first is that our universities are a major national asset, a crucial element of soft power and the basis of our claim to be a scientific superpower, as Boris Johnson was very proud of saying. They are also crucial for innovation, national economic growth and regional regeneration, and thus, as several Peers have said, for levelling up. Universities are also hubs for city regions and sources of skilled workers and cultural leadership for their regions.

The second, alternative narrative is that universities are nests of left-wing intellectuals, hostile to common sense and the instincts of ordinary voters, intent, to quote the Sunday Telegraph on “indoctrinating” their students with leftist or even Marxist ideas. It is the Policy Exchange perspective, if you like. University staff are alleged to be structurally biased. Even worse, they are “experts”, whom we all know are not to be listened to. They are “people of nowhere”, in the David Goodhart-Theresa May definition, dismissed as people who prefer foreign food and foreign friends to being proud of all things English. Particular fury has been directed at the humanities and the social sciences as offering irrelevant and frivolous courses. I find that a very dangerous narrative. I note that it comes from the anti-intellectual arguments produced by Republicans in the United States, and I hope that the Minister, who I know cares passionately about education, does not share it. Sadly, some of her colleagues do. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, remarked that it is a convenient arena for a culture war, if one wants one. We do not want one; it is the last thing we need in this country.

The Government have wobbled between these two narratives over the past eight years. They have squeezed university funding as severely as funding for schools and preschool education. They have frozen tuition fees, and they have left the EU, and thus Horizon and Erasmus, and also the structural funds, some of which flowed to universities in the poorer parts of Britain.

The incoherence of policy has been really quite remarkable. That is partly because of the high turnover of Ministers. In the five years since January 2018, we have had successive reorganisations of ministerial responsibility and witnessed seven Secretaries of State for Education come and go; six Secretaries of State for Business and Industrial Strategy, and now a seventh for Business and Trade; seven Ministers for Higher Education; and, thankfully, only five Secretaries of State for Science and Innovation. None has stayed in post long enough to master their brief; policies have drifted, with the overall assumption that the UK should distance itself as far as possible from the European continent and that, as far as possible, public spending on education and research should be held down. This is not the way we need to go, and we very much need to reverse course.

I add that the role of the Office for Students, which has been mentioned by several people in the debate, is itself in question. It is unclear whether the Office for Students is there to help support the university sector or to police and regulate what are seen as the dangers of the university sector. That is another area at which we need to look.

Several Members have talked about the freezing of tuition fees. Their value has dropped by well over 20% and the current inflation makes it worse. If we were now to have a collapse in the intake of students from east and south Asia, there would be a financial crisis in many of our universities. We have not talked much about maintenance grants and social mobility, but the squeezing of funds for foundation courses is a real squeeze on social mobility. Some universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are now working very hard to find bright but undereducated young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I suggest that, now that we are returning to rather a calmer sort of government—we hope—the Government might like to think about setting out another independent review of what we need to do about university funding when the current arrangements end in 2024-25, after the next election. The Minister will remember that, in 2008, the Labour Government kicked the issue of tuition fees past the election by setting up the Browne review. I recommend that the Government consider doing the same now, so that at least when the next Government come in there is some sort of consensus about where we need to go from here.

We have talked a little about international research networks. All research is essentially international and cross-border. We benefit enormously from links with European countries, North America and beyond, and we all recognise that leaving the European Union has damaged those links very considerably. Incoherence is there again across Whitehall. I have heard British academics working in the United States say that that they do not wish to come back to Britain because they know their American wives will be in the queue at the Home Office and that they will have to pay a lot of money to get them into this country. My son brought his American wife back and did pay the money he needed to pay to do it.

Some 20% or more of most universities’ staff come from abroad, and the tightening of Home Office policy on visas means that, when they accept a post, it is harder and harder for them to get their families into this country. That damages the culture of our universities as well. Getting the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Treasury and the Department for Business to have, together, a sense of understanding about what is needed for our universities to flourish is something the Government might usefully spend time on.

Others have spoken on Erasmus and Turing, so I need to say little, except that moving back towards a more sensible and rational relationship with our neighbours must include rejoining not only Horizon but Erasmus. Rejoining Horizon will not be easy and there are those who say, “Good heavens, we are going to have to pay for this”. Of course we are going to have to pay. We gained more from Horizon when we were members of the European Union than we paid in for the scheme, but that was because this was part of an overall balance between contributions and obligations to the European Union. Now that we are outside—and saving our £350 million, or whatever it is, per week—if we wish to rejoin these schemes, we will have to pay. There are advantages for us.

We are, I hope, an international country. We are escaping, I hope, from English nationalism, from which we have suffered so badly in the last few years. That means we need to maintain a university network which benefits enormously from its international ties but which contributes fundamentally to the prosperity of this country. I think the Minister shares all these objectives; I only wish the rest of the Government did.