Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Lord Willetts Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. I begin by drawing the House’s attention to my interests as an honorary fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at King’s College London. I also look forward to the two maiden speeches from new Members of this House, although it appears that both of them are significantly older than 29. We look forward to learning of their experiences.

The Bill is a very welcome measure, which brings extra flexibility into higher education and has the potential to yield bold reforms in how higher education is delivered. I very much hope that it works and succeeds in promoting access to higher education, but I warn the Minister that I hope that therefore it avoids the mistakes and problems that I experienced and which were referred to by the noble Baroness opposite when she talked about the decline in adult learning post 2010. We were actually very optimistic: we thought that extending larger fee loans to adult and part-time learners would maintain or even increase demand for higher education from them. However, it did not play out like that.

As I looked back on why that expectation that I had was not fulfilled, the lesson that I and others drew was that, for an 18 year-old, at a massive fork in the road in their life, choosing between going into higher education and doing something different—perhaps going into work—the overall benefits of higher education were clear and obvious, and they were willing to take out a loan, on the basis of payback if they were in a well-paid job. However, for someone already in work, who already has family commitments and who cannot be confident that taking a particular modular course will necessarily transform their earnings and opportunities, it does not look quite such an obvious and attractive option to take out extra debt—even though, as we all understand in this House, it is nothing like conventional debt. Given that that is the experience of the past decade or more, I very much hope that the Minister will be able to explain to the House why these lifelong loan entitlements will be successful in promoting demand for adult learning.

As we have already heard, there are then a set of issues about the supply of provision. It would be very interesting to know what scope there is. Perhaps the Minister is already in conversations with the Treasury about the circumstances in which these loans will be available to people. There may even be estimates going back and forth of the so-called RAB charge—how much of the loan is going to be written off. I hope that the Minister is successful in these discussions, but the more that she can share with us the information about what kind of provision she thinks she will be able to offer, as well as who is going to be making this provision, the more helpful it will be. It is possible that one of the most important and radical measures in the Bill is the new third category of registration with the Office for Students, which would enable new providers to come in and supplement existing provision from established universities. Can she share with the House a bit more information about how the new third category is going to operate?

I have some brief, specific questions. Obviously, one model is that we find that this entitlement is taken up by people dipping into more higher education later in life, but will the Minister confirm that this is a four-year entitlement that will be available for people after they start from university in the near future? Therefore, it would be perfectly possible for a new student to embark on a four-year course with a full four-year entitlement. Indeed, it may be—given the anxieties among adult learners—that the biggest growth is in four-year provision among new undergraduates. Will the Minister confirm that, if that means more people getting useful higher education for longer, that is something that the Government will welcome and support?

There has been a lot of concern expressed by the OfS and others about so-called positive outcomes from courses. One way in which you do not get a positive outcome is supposed to be if you drop out. We are used to a view of higher education whereby dropping out is a bad thing. However, it is very difficult to reconcile the rhetoric of dropping out being a bad thing with the celebration of people dipping in and out of higher education—doing a short course, then withdrawing for whatever reason, then coming back to do some more higher education study. If the OfS is going to carry on monitoring and criticising universities with high drop-out rates, and we are also going to encourage flexibility and moving in and out of higher education, I am sure that, if there is any person who can reconcile these two rather different approaches, it is the Minister in this House, and we very much look forward to her account of how the regime will operate. The fact is that some flexibility is actually a good thing, and the Bill is an opportunity to recognise that.

Finally, I hope the Minister will, in the course of our scrutiny of the Bill, share with us more about the metrics the Government will be using for success. How will we assess how well this is doing? What levels of take-up might we expect, what type of courses might students be doing, and how rapidly will she perhaps succeed in reaching her agreement with the Treasury on the scope and ambition of the actual provision that follows?