Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Willetts]

21: The Schedule, page 12, line 21, at end insert—
“3A Section 1 does not apply to— (a) a registered higher education provider in England, as defined by section 3(10) of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017;(b) an institution within the higher education sector in Wales, as defined by section 91 of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992;(c) an institution within the higher education sector in Scotland, as defined by section 56 of the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 1992;(d) a higher education institution in Northern Ireland, as defined by article 30 of the Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1993.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would remove universities and other higher education providers from the requirement to act in accordance with Clause 1.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, we have been going for quite a long time. I will try to keep this brisk because there is apparently still a lot of business to get through today. I should declare my interests in the register, particularly my role as a member of the council of the University of Southampton, because I think university councils could be among the bodies covered by this proposed legislation. Although I will draw on my experiences there, these are of course my personal opinions.

In many ways, the purpose of this amendment, which is essentially to remove universities from the scope of this legislation, arises because universities are just the most acute example of the wider problems in this legislation that have already been discussed. I will briefly explain why I think some of these problems are particularly acute in higher education. First, is there actually a problem of boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions in the higher education sector? I have still not come across any actual, real examples of any university ever trying to do what this legislation would forbid.

There are certainly lots of examples of student unions campaigning on this, and earlier we heard some of those cited, but student unions are not—thank heavens—covered by this legislation. All these issues being debated in student unions are part of the process of learning, growing up and political engagement. But it seems rather odd to pass legislation affecting the universities, which do not do anything, and ignoring the student unions where all these debates happen. It is therefore not relevant to the actual decisions that any real university takes. What is the problem that is supposed to be solved?

I am aware of the media coverage today about what is happening in our universities. The Government’s argument is that this helps with community cohesion. We have heard a lot about community cohesion. I have to say that the weight placed on community cohesion in the context of boycotts and disinvestment is the exact opposite of the weight attached to those kinds of arguments when we were debating the freedom of speech legislation. The irony is that one of the arguments then was that there are people who have to run these institutions. They have a set of rival claims to balance. Is it legitimate for them to say, “Of course you want to hold your controversial event, but perhaps not during the same week as exams are happening”? Or, “Of course you want to have your speaker who may be anti-gay, but perhaps not in Gay Pride week”?

In other words, lots of arguments about community cohesion were completely dismissed on the grounds that there is an absolutist right to freedom of speech, and it is just possible that some of the activities that apparently are now concerning No. 10 are protected by the very legislation that the Government passed only a few months back on an absolutist argument: “You must be able to say these kinds of things”. On the very first day on which the legislation was announced, the then Universities Minister said on the radio, “Yes, of course, Holocaust denial would be permitted and protected by this legislation”. It is a bit odd but, anyway, we have now gone from community cohesion being totally irrelevant to community cohesion being the absolute argument that trumps all others. It is a legitimate consideration but does not bear the weight now being placed on it, and it is probably a great pity that it was not given any weight at all when we were considering freedom of speech.

When it comes to freedom of speech, universities are lively, disputatious places, as are councils of universities. When legislation is supposed to apply to universities and tries to conclude that it would be wrong and prohibited if a decision

“was influenced by political or moral disapproval of foreign state conduct”,

it is hard to imagine a lively debate in a university council that does not involve somebody sounding off about some foreign state or other and how much they disapprove of it and what it is doing for some reason or other. The idea that you can try to forbid consideration of these types of factors in a decision-taking environment such as a university seems to be total fantasy.

It is not only that we all know the life of universities and how disputatious they are but the Government themselves, in other contexts, encourage universities to think about these kinds of factors. Until last year I was on the board of UKRI, which was developing a trusted research agenda that asked universities to consider some of those factors. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, has already been praised enough this evening, but he astutely quoted from the advice that the business department gives to businesses. I am sorry to repeat what he said, but it was absolutely to the point. The advice states:

“UK citizens and businesses should be aware of the potential reputational implications of getting involved in economic and financial activities in settlements, as well as possible abuses of the rights of individuals”.


Businesses are invited to consider that. Will the Minister explain whether it would be illegal for someone in or chairing a meeting of a university council, after a decision has been taken, to cite the advice that the Government themselves have provided in a different context? What if someone said, “We have been influenced on our economic and financial decisions because of possible abuses of the rights of individuals”? Is that legitimate, or is it now to be illegal in universities but advice from government in a different context? It really is quite a muddle.

The Minister may reply to that concern, “But universities are public bodies”. It is not totally clear what makes a university a public body, and we have also heard the expression “public authorities”—I do not know whether that comes charged with some other particular legal meaning. We have also had “hybrid public bodies”. I am increasingly concerned that the bit-by-bit process of adding more regulation and more legal compliance duties on universities pulls them into the public sector, when one of the reasons we have such a well-respected and high-quality university system is precisely the universities’ autonomy. They used to score very highly just for their capacity to run their own affairs. With every step-by-step process in which they appear in more and more of these lists of bodies to be covered by legislation, the greater is the risk that they lose their autonomy and eventually end up as part of the public sector.

Of course, this is just one more step. The ONS is reviewing whether universities should be categorised as in the public sector. This is not necessarily the straw that will break the camel’s back and will determine that they are in the public sector, but every time in this Chamber we find some other cause that we care about and say “Let’s add universities to the list and cover them as well”, the greater the risk that that is where they will end up.

I remember the days when the Government increased taxes on North Sea oil companies. We never knew at what point they would go on investment strike and turn away; it was hard to predict, but at some point they did. At some point, we will have brought universities into the public sector if we are not careful and, when we look back to how it happened, this will be one of the many steps in the process that takes us to that position.

I am more concerned about that when I hear the other doctrine of the single foreign policy. It is quite a new doctrine, this idea that somehow all these public bodies, in some broad sense going beyond the public sector, all have to have one foreign policy. It is true that universities can play a role in foreign policy. I remember when I used to go on missions to India, accompanied on a couple of occasions by the vice-chancellor of Cambridge. I knew my place. I would speak to the Indian Science Minister or the Indian Universities Minister but, because the Prime Minister of India was an alumnus of Cambridge, the vice-chancellor went to see him and occasionally told me what had happened in these conversations. It was quite helpful to have the vice-chancellor’s much higher-level connections than I could possibly muster.

Of course, universities are places where people debate foreign policy issues. They certainly debate all these moral considerations around boycotts. Can we not be a little more relaxed, accepting that, on the very broad definition of public bodies, which is now in this legislation, there will be, in a modern, diverse civil society, a range of views? The Foreign Secretary’s authority to communicate British foreign policy is not weakened by some university having a view on the morality of something happening in the Middle East. The old doctrine was exactly the opposite: “One of the great things about Britain is that we have lively public debate, there’s no central control and we don’t go round giving everybody else instructions about what they should say about these things. That’s just the kind of country we are”. And I think that was great—we were not anxious about the wide range of different views that might be expressed.

I referred to the Foreign Secretary, my noble friend Lord Cameron, and perhaps that is a note on which to end. One of his most effective political slogans was that he wanted to see a small state and a big society. The more we expand this definition of public bodies and public authorities that all have to be guided by the single foreign policy doctrine, the more we grow the state and shrink society. That is not the right direction in which to go and universities should not be part of it.

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[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me to be fundamental to this Bill that universities and other relevant bodies are included. We are not talking about individual academics having their right to free speech being affected at all. We are talking about institutional behaviour. Yes, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has pointed out, what happens in universities really matters. I also went on a trade trip to China with the vice-chancellors. I remember, because they were the ones sitting in business class. They are a very important part of the fabric of our society—

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

You were in first class—

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

Possibly first class. No one can forget that academia is not immune to bigotry. Let us recall that Heidelberg University in Germany was no less prestigious than any UK university in its day. In the 1920s, it was the centre of liberal thinking. A decade later, a mob of Heidelberg students burned Jewish and other so-called “corrupt” books in the Universitätsplatz. Jewish students and Jewish academics were banned, its faculty developed pseudo-academic fields such as race theory, eugenics and forced euthanasia. Heidelberg was led by administrators who lacked moral leadership—and we all know how this ended.

It cannot be right that students at universities around the world feel unprotected and threatened. Most ironically, only a few years ago, children of Jewish friends of mine were telling their parents they did not feel comfortable going to a UK university, so they applied to go to one in the United States. The appalling lack of leadership in some US universities has quite rightly led to the removal of their leadership in some famous cases. We are all watching Columbia University, apparently led by the noble Baroness, Lady Shafik, most carefully to see whether it can exhibit proper leadership against the vile intimidation and abuse.

In the UK, we have seen many universities fail to take proper action. I will cite some alarming incidents indicative of this unsafe environment. For example, in Leeds there was the attack on a Jewish chaplain, a rabbi, the sit-in at the Parkinson building, the daubing of the Jewish student centre and the encampment outside of the student union. Apart from the absurdity of the protesters protesting against an occupation by occupying university buildings, the demonstrations themselves are misplaced—and, as at other universities, such as King’s College, Cambridge, are causing huge distress to Jewish students, as has been noted.

Despite very sterling work by the noble Lord, Lord Mann, it is endemic. In Birmingham, students called for “Zionists off our campus”. We know what they mean, “No Jews here”—as they did in Heidelberg. A while ago, in December 2021, City University students, among others, demanded a BDS ban. It was stopped only because the Charity Commission ruled that this was in breach of its charitable status. Interestingly, the leader of the call for BDS there, Shaima Dallali, was subsequently elected president of the National Union of Students before she was suspended for anti-Semitism. The connection between the call for BDS and anti-Semitism is staring us in the face

--- Later in debate ---

I am sorry to have taken time to answer the questions raised. I put it to my noble friend Lord Willetts, and the Committee, that universities should be open spaces for academics and students to debate alternative points of view. I think we are all agreed on that. It is inappropriate and divisive for universities to take a side on foreign policy matters in their corporate capacity; this Bill takes a measured approach to preventing them from doing just that. I hope he will agree to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for engaging with the points that have been made. I will certainly want to look at some of her observations carefully; the business investment guidelines, for example, are potentially a very important concession and piece of advice.

However, I think the mood on all sides of the Committee is one of deep scepticism about whether these provisions really will help and have any significant effect when it comes to higher education. We have heard powerful interventions from my noble friend Lord Johnson, and a particularly powerful point from the noble Lord, Lord Mann, with his long history of engagement and challenges in fighting anti-Semitism.

Perhaps I may briefly pick up on two points. The question from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, on where this comes from goes to the heart of this legislation. This is American legislation. This is an American culture war brought to the UK. Universities are involved in this because in the US they have massive endowments. The politics of BDS is about D, above all: investment. What has happened is that the provisions go from the highly charged American debate about the investment of over $800 billion, the size of American endowments—that is why the American neocons go for BDS provisions in universities—and have been incorporated into this Bill, which now comes over here and those provisions are replicated.

This cuts both ways. It is not a straightforward point. The reality is that British university endowments in total are probably 1% of American endowments. So all the charged politics and the significant financial decisions, as one tries to argue politically about investing $800 billion, is not quite so charged if it is perhaps $8 billion in total. However, it is also the case that one can predict, and you can see it happening, that some universities have endowments and this matter will be increasingly raised in those tent cities on some of our campuses. “Will you promise that you won’t invest in companies doing business with Israel?” I can see that happening as a cause.

This is where the inclusion of the Occupied Territories gets very complicated. I may say so, it was a strategic blunder in the formulation of this legislation because, by including the Occupied Territories, where there is explicit government guidance already, “Be very careful about investing in them”, that totally muddles up the issue. So I suspect that the way all this will go is that the government concession will be on removing the Occupied Territories from the provisions. It would be great if the Government would also consider more widely what they are doing on universities. This is an area where, again, the British debate is so different from the American debate.

On the ONS issue, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made a fair point. This is absolutely not automatic, but we are aware of what happened with further education colleges. That is why this is such a highly charged issue for higher education; it is because FE colleges have already been through this twice. The issue is control. At what point do things look controlling? Normally the ONS gives the Government time to correct and reverse the measures that might pull a body into the public sector. If this were to happen with universities, one very much hopes that the Government would try to pull them out and then they would probably bring before the House a long list of control measures that were being rescinded in order to get those bodies healthily out of the public sector. I have a modest bet that this would be one of the many pieces of legislation on the chopping block in order to reverse the danger.

In the light of the Minister’s comments, I certainly beg leave to withdraw the amendment now, but we may find ourselves returning to it at a later stage.

Amendment 21 withdrawn.