Higher Education (Fee Limits and Fee Limit Condition) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2025

Debate between Lord Willetts and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Monday 3rd March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this measure. I should declare my interests as a visiting professor at King’s College London and a member of the University of Southampton’s council. I know from seeing universities close up that the situation is indeed serious, as the Minister rightly said. The freeze in the level of fees has meant a 28% cut in the real resource available for universities in the last seven years. This cannot carry on, so I support this measure.

Having heard the Minister’s arguments about the need to strengthen universities’ financial position, I would add that it is a pity that the entire extra revenues for universities from this measure go in meeting the national insurance costs that they face. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us, in her winding-up speech, her estimate of the extra expenditure on national insurance for universities as compared to the extra receipts from these higher fees. What I conclude from this is that, if the Minister is to live up to the excellent rhetoric about putting universities on a sounder financial footing, she will need to go further in future. I hope that, in her response, she can give some indication of her plans for the future. I would encourage the Minister to carry on with indexation as an absolute minimum—after all, that is what the Blair Government did, automatically indexing fees year after year—because, otherwise, the problem that she described so eloquently will just continue to get worse.

A range of us have, in different ways, tried to find an alternative system for funding higher education. Employers will not put up any more, and the Treasury and the taxpayers are not going to put up any more either. So we all end up reluctantly concluding that this is the only game in town. All three political parties represented in the Committee today have concluded that you have to put up fees in order to sustain our higher education system—and that is the case.

We could all learn a lot from my noble friend Lord Johnson, who introduced the TEF. Clear pressure to raise the quality of teaching is an important part of any future increase. Personally, instead of the rather random process of an Augar review or a freeze, I always wanted to see a quinquennial review—a review every five years—modelled to some extent on the way in which the social security system operates, from which we can always learn. A quinquennial review would enable a judgment to be made about the right level of the repayment threshold and the right level of fees, in the light of what had happened to earnings and the cost of higher education, and it could set out a formula that lasted for the life of a Parliament.

I will not comment on foundation years. I recognise the political and popular anxieties about measures such as this. Such measures never poll well, but the reason for that is often a misunderstanding. A lot of people still think that students have to pay up front, and a lot of people, including parents, think that the debt is like a credit card debt or an overdraft, meaning that, if their child has a £50,000 debt, they can take out £50,000 less as a mortgage. Those are misconceptions. The fundamental case for these measures is that they are in the best interests of students. Students will have a well-financed and well-funded higher education and, as the Minister rightly explained, will pay back only on a repayment formula that is not changed by these measures.

Finally, I urge that, now that the Government are operating with a model that they themselves were crucial in designing, the Minister and the Government own it. All three parties have a shared interest in trying to communicate the reality of this system. If ever we lapse into saying that the fees should not go up because there is a cost of living crisis, that feeds misunderstanding and is extremely irresponsible.

I hope that the Minister will be able to spare the time for a meeting where we could go through the painful lessons I have learned about how one tries to communicate the reality of the system. I also hope that she might consider a more strategic approach, so that universities know that the real resource they have will at least be protected in the years to come.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I also must declare an interest, as a member of the academic staff of King’s College London. I would also like to note that I was a member of the Augar review. Apropos of the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, of a quinquennial review, I am rather pleased that it has taken only six years since the final report of the Augar review to get to some of the implementation of it.

Obviously, I welcome the Government’s decision finally to raise fees a little, but I would like to say something about foundation years. As the Government’s memorandum points out, this came out of the Augar review’s recommendation: basically, foundation years should go, except in a few specific high-skill and very important subjects, such as medicine. It is worth noting that, although the Government—indeed, their predecessor was in a similar position—decided not to go that far, as has been pointed out,

“there is little evidence that studying a foundation year is always necessary for students wishing to access an undergraduate course in these subjects, and potential foundation year students can choose functionally similar courses—such as Access to HE diplomas—that cost significantly less”—

or, as in the case of A-level resits, cost them nothing at all.

Although I very much welcome the decision to reduce the level of fees on classroom-based foundation years, I recollect for the record that when we first looked at them on the Augar committee, nobody had really noticed, including us. It was pointed out to us by the FE principal member of our committee, Bev Robinson, who basically said, “Do you realise what’s happening?”. She also noted—I cannot tell how widespread this was—that she had come across some very aggressive recruiting by universities of young people who, in her view, would have been much better off either doing access to HE or retaking their A-levels.

I underline that the Government recognise this, and that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee also noted:

“While we welcome attempts to encourage under-represented groups into HE, we would be concerned if these came at the expense of poor value for money for those students and for taxpayers”.


The consultation process resulted in a small majority of people saying that they did not want the fees to go up. However, the majority of non-higher education provider respondents definitely wanted the fees to go down. That is where we are.

My view is that there is still a question mark over these years. I thank the Minister for cutting the fees for foundation years in classroom-based subjects, but can she assure us that the Government will continue to monitor enrolments to see whether that does in fact put an end to the enormous growth that there has been? Will she consider asking the department to study the impact of foundation-year study on young people who go by that route, and how successful they are? It is very easy to forget about it again, and it crept up on everybody unawares—and I think everyone is agreed that it is a good thing that we are taking some action.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Willetts and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts]

I am encouraged by what we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I think that there is a kind of logical structure here which the removal of Clause 48 would damage. We have currently a lively set of arrangements for validating degrees carried out by a range of universities. I was involved, for example, in supporting a programme to create a new higher education institution in Herefordshire. When it tried to find a validator, it had a queue of universities that wished to be the validator. We have a lively market at the moment, although there are concerns that it may not always cover every case and is not as open as it should be.

There is a proposal that it should be possible, if necessary, for the Office for Students to commission a validating body if it is concerned that validating is not being done properly. However, in cases where it has not been able to commission arrangements that ensure validation, in the last resort it may itself be the validator. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is right that it is unusual for a regulator also to be the validator, but I hope we will hear from the Minister that the circumstances in which that became necessary are rather remote. Given what is already happening, one would expect either the current arrangements for validating to be satisfactory or for the OfS to be able to commission a body that will undertake validation.

The argument for Clause 48, which it is proposed should be deleted, is that it is the logical long stop in the event that it has not been possible to commission anyone else to carry out the arrangements. On the basis that it is unlikely the power will be necessary, but we can understand why it has to be held in reserve, I think Clause 48 is needed and the amendment to remove it would leave a potential gap in the system. I hope we will hear more on that from the Minister.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, has said and with his response to the letter, which is encouraging. I am particularly encouraged by the fact that there will be better consultation. Although I agree that we need a final long stop, what we have at the moment is that the regulator has to put itself on the register and then award degrees, and that could be addressed with a little more care.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Willetts and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, on the National Student Survey, and will speak to Amendments 194 and 201 standing in my name. Before doing so I would like to underline that we are talking about the use of measures to give ratings. With respect to the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, I think that there is a huge difference between what is useful internally and what is suitable for a high-profile, high-stakes national rating system. In my first amendment I have suggested, or requested, that any measures used should be criteria-referenced, and therefore provide a substantive rating and indication of attainment or degree of attainment. I am slightly alarmed that this is even at issue, and take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, when he suggests that benchmarking is the way forward.

I have an example from the rail regulator. We can be told what proportion of trains are late, which is a substantive measure: we can have a target—which in fact it has—which says that it is reasonable that there should be X per cent, and then you fall this far short. We can be told whether a given rail company is doing better or worse than the others. This year it is really pretty easy for everybody to do better than Southern, but does that mean that they are all doing well? I do not think that you can conclude that.

If you have benchmarked or relative measures, the problem is that all that you are being told is how people stand relative to each other. We might have a system in which the quality of teaching was excellent across the board, yet in which half the institutions would by definition be below average; or we could have a system in which all the institutions were doing rather poor-quality teaching, yet in which half of them would be above average. That is not the sort of system that we wish to use. We would not wish to imply to students that that gave them helpful information. A measure that is bad does not become good by being made relative; and a measure that is good is good in its own right, not simply by being turned into something in which you rank people on the curve. That is an important aspect of how the Office for Students approaches the sorts of ratings that it gives and the way in which it conceives of them.

[Lord Willetts]

Does the noble Baroness accept that her objection is the opposite of the one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey? His objection was that these are raw data that cannot be trusted. As a result of that concern, they are being benchmarked, and that indeed raises the valid questions which she has raised.