Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Willetts and Lord Lucas

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, we are surely clear that the route that we are going down will mean that institutions go bust and find themselves unable to function. My noble friend the Minister said in one of his replies to me on Monday that information as to whether a university was getting near the borderline, in terms of having the ability to admit overseas students removed from it, would be concealed. So we must expect students to be faced with the closure of their courses at short notice, and we must expect the institutions running those courses to be completely incapable of helping them.

In those circumstances, we need what my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth has proposed, which is a mutual scheme. That must have the ability to organise for the courses to happen—so it must have money and it must have agreement that room will be made for students. It must have enough leverage to deal with the Home Office, because any student who is looking at an extended time here to complete a course will be in real trouble—returning home; six-month waits—trying to organise extensions. It is difficult enough for a student at Imperial who needs an extra year for his PhD; it will be extremely difficult for students in a failed institution. We need some money, some clout and some organisation behind this. If it is not to be the sort of structure that my noble friend proposes, my Amendment 163 would dump the obligation to look after such students on the OfS—but it has to be somewhere.

[Lord Willetts]

My Lords, I welcome particularly the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. The official doctrine has always been that a university can go bust, but I was never able to contemplate the political feasibility of a scenario where a padlock is swinging on the gates of a university, with a group of students outside desperate to go in for their history lectures and being told, “I am terribly sorry; we’re closed”, while tumbleweed blows through the campus. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher faced this in 1985 in Cardiff. She was not willing to allow University College, Cardiff to go bust. I think that we can accept that we are functioning in an environment where in reality it will be very hard just to say, “Bad luck. You’ve done 18 months of a course and it’s come to an end”.

The question is how one should address that, which gets to the heart of some quite important issues in the Bill. There has been a fashionable doctrine for a few years of the ABTA solution—and some kind of scheme like that could be made to work—but in my experience the closest we got to this problem was clearly HEFCE. It was acting as the co-ordinator, organiser and convenor. It might have been that students had to be located at several other universities and it would get different universities to make their contributions so that students would be educated. If we get into such a scenario—my noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right that we have to contemplate it—it is very hard to see how it could be resolved without some convening power for the OfS, which, as I have said in other contexts in this Committee stage, is in many respects the son of HEFCE. A lot of our problems will be resolved if we think of it as the son of HEFCE. My noble friend’s proposal to make it clear that there is some legal responsibility for OfS must be an important and credible part of any solution. It is not credible to imagine that the matter could be addressed via an ABTA-type scheme.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Willetts and Lord Lucas

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the amendment begins very well:

“UK universities are autonomous institutions”,

but the rest of the subsection abolishes that effect entirely. I am really worried about the ability in the Bill of a quango to abolish Oxford, to put it in cartoon terms. This proposed subsection gives anybody the right to abolish Oxford. The moment that anybody can argue that Oxford has not upheld the principles of academic freedom, and if that is argued in court and it goes against Oxford, it is no longer a university. That is an astonishing level of control. You really do not need the rest of the Bill. There would be complete government control over all universities just by having this amendment as the Bill. There is so much in here that allows universities to be controlled because it is mostly about telling universities what they have to do.

If we are going to have a clause such as this—and I really support the idea of it—let us have something that gives universities rights, declares that they are autonomous, and other things that we can think of that work, but let us not keep all these unstructured obligations on them, which can go only in entirely the opposite direction from that which is intended by the proposers.

[Lord Willetts]

My noble friend is making a really important point, which I strongly agree with. Will he accept that when we turn later to, for example, Amendment 65 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, we then have an approach which might be better at achieving this objective than the approach we are debating now?