Higher Education White Paper

Lord Wills Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

Well, we will try not to quibble about 50,000 but I can see the odd accountant sitting opposite me. Of those, 65,000 are AAB students. We are not creating new places for them but we are allowing the HE institutions to compete for them. Therefore, the University of X might want to expand certain courses by bringing in more of those students, but that would mean, by definition, that the University of Y might lose out. However, we think that it is necessary to bring in that element of competition. The 20,000 places that I added to that are not for AAB students but for those where universities offer value for money with their courses coming in on average, after waivers and so on, at or below £7,500. Again, it will be open to universities to compete for those places. It is not a question of creating new places at this stage. However, if matters were to become more contestable, we would certainly want to look at that in the future, and, as I made clear in the Statement, we aim to expand the scheme further year after year.

I noted what my noble friend said about the cost of loans. Obviously loans are expensive but they would be considerably more expensive if they were not arranged by the Government. The Government can, after all, borrow at considerably cheaper rates than individuals.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement made in the other place. He will be aware of widespread concerns about the damage that these reforms pose to the position of the humanities in higher education. I wonder whether he shares those concerns and if so, what he will do about them. If he does not share those concerns, why not?

[Lord Henley]

I simply do not accept those concerns, as was made clear in the debate we had some six months ago when we debated the original announcement about student loans. It will be up to the universities to attract the right students. Those students will bring the money with them that will pay for the courses.

Higher Education (Basic Amount) (England) Regulations 2010

Lord Wills Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I do not agree with that assessment because no one will be paying anything until they earn £21,000 or whatever the figure will be after it has been increased. That figure of £21,000 is roughly the average wage. Thereafter, we go on up to about £42,000 before people pay the maximum, which is RPI plus 3 per cent. I do not think that that is the credit card levels of interest that the noble Lord and others seem to imply. That is not a heavy repayment to ask of someone on £30,000, £40,000 or even £50,000 or £60,000. If we take medical students as an example, a GP now earns in excess of £100,000. When one thinks of their investment, that is not a bad return.

I now want to deal with timing, as it has been alleged that we are rushing this through too fast. I want to stress again that we have a responsibility to give students, their families and the universities certainty about what arrangements will be in place for the 2012-13 academic year. One has to remember that, although the White Paper will not come out until early in the new year, already by then students will be beginning to visit the universities that they want to apply to for 2012. They will be starting to apply in the summer of 2011 for some courses, so everyone, including the institutions, need to know where they stand and when they can plan ahead.

Finally, I come back to the nature of the amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has sought to reassure the House that his amendments are merely an invitation to the Government and another place to think again. I make it clear in no uncertain terms that this is not an occasion when we can think again. These two amendments are fatal and, if carried, would negate and override the vote in another place last week.

[Lord Wills]

Before the Minister concludes his remarks, I wonder whether he will address the question of humanities in the curriculum of our universities. What guarantee can he give that humanities will continue to have an appropriate place in curriculums?

[Lord Henley]

They will have an appropriate place in the curriculum. Universities will be able to charge fees to students and will receive them up front without the students having to repay anything. The fees will then go to the universities. That is what this is all about. In the end, the good universities will flourish and good courses will also flourish.

Common Agricultural Policy

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, this issue is of considerable importance, not just to the agricultural sector but to consumers and taxpayers throughout Europe, as well as to developing countries and to all those who cherish our countryside. I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on securing this debate. As he said, it is a timely one, and I join him in hoping that this will be the first of many occasions on which the House returns to this subject as this latest bout of reform unfolds, in what will undoubtedly be a long and tortuous process. Although the subject is of such importance to so many people, it is an opaque, complex and technical one, which therefore often does not receive the proper scrutiny that it should. I see a list of distinguished speakers with a great deal of experience in this matter, so I shall confine my remarks to a plea to the Government for greater transparency in the way the policy operates.

As is well known, Europe has gone through profound changes since the end of the Second World War. We have seen Germany divided and reunited and the Union grow from the original six members of the EEC, almost inexorably, to the current 27 members of the European Union. Globalisation has transformed the world economy with great social and political consequences, yet in the midst of this profound change—one of the most profound and rapid periods of change in human history—this one institution sails on. Occasionally it is buffeted by reforms, and it has changed quite considerably from the original conception, but it is still recognisably the same institution. Its flaws have been well rehearsed, and I do not want to go into them in great detail today, but it is worth just remembering that the combined costs in the most recent estimate that I have been able to find for the British family of four is £10.40 a week in terms of a direct subsidy with the increased costs to the consumer.

This policy still occupies more than 40 per cent of the European budget. The OECD has estimated that the cost to the European consumer in higher food prices due to the CAP is around £39 billion. The policy has done considerable damage to developing countries in the past, although I recognise that there have been considerable changes in recent years which have mitigated those problems. The figures are very complex and it is difficult to secure any kind of unanimity on them, and the impact on developing countries clearly depends on where the countries are and what period we are talking about, but it is generally accepted that this process of agricultural subsidy has done great damage in the past to some of the world’s poorest people.

The CAP has not really even benefited the farmers that it was most meant to protect. Because payments remain linked to production, 85 per cent of aid still goes to the top 17 per cent of recipients. In 2008, Prince Hans Adam of Liechtenstein got nearly €1.6 million in subsidy, while Prince Albert of Monaco got €250,000. In 2009, Tate & Lyle received more than £250,000 in subsidy. As with all agricultural subsidies throughout the developed world, these represent a form of welfare for agri-businesses. This flawed policy costs a great deal of money to administer—about €175 million. For 2004, which is the latest year that can be considered as finalised, which is a statement that in itself speaks volumes, around €100 million was taken up with fraud and so-called irregularity. So far as we can tell from the leaked documents, it looks as if support will continue to be linked to the size of the farm rather than to incomes, so this kind of skewed distribution is likely to continue.

I hope that these remarks, which will be familiar to all Members of this House, will not be construed as me attacking farming. They certainly should not be, because I believe that agriculture is far more than just another business. Among other things, it sustains our countryside, which is so precious in so many ways to all of us. The need for food security is indisputable, and I see the need for some form of stable support. All I would ask is whether this antiquated system of centralised, bureaucratic state subsidy is really the best way forward. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and I will have occasion to return to this debate in the coming months.

Before I move on to my final point, I recognise that there have been significant improvements in this policy over the years. Every bout of reform has seen considerable improvements and I pay tribute to the huge efforts that have been required, as everyone in the House will recognise, from large numbers of dedicated public servants across the European Union. Yet all of that effort has still been what I regard as a patch-and-mend operation on what remains, at root, a flawed policy. If I am right about that, how is it that such a policy, which costs so many people so much, has persisted without really radical reform for so long?

It is a textbook example of how the politics of subsidy work. There are institutional handouts and bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves managing them, obfuscating the process and making it opaque for the general public—the voters—to understand. Above all, the fundamental problem is that the costs of this policy are spread thinly across all the people of Europe, whereas the benefits are concentrated on a happy few so that they have a far greater incentive to keep the system going than those who pay the price, largely in ignorance of what is being done to them.

I recognise that there is no possibility of scrapping the CAP and starting again from scratch. The political costs of any such transition would be impossible. But if we are to see progress in reforming this policy, in the direction in which I think most people would want to see it reformed, we need to have a much better informed public debate. Transparency is absolutely central to that. That is why I read with some depression a judgment by the European Court of Justice, published on 8 November, which said that the current EU laws and regulations on disclosure of beneficiaries of farm subsidies are “invalid”. Those regulations about transparency have been responsible for the pressure continuing for reform of this policy. Whatever the legal justifications for this decision, it is clear to me that the public interest must lie in greater transparency.

It must be right that the public understand, as fully as possible, the policy for which they are paying. It is a safeguard against fraud, which has been endemic in the operation of this policy. It should also enable the public to see the counterbalancing advantages of this policy, which previous speakers have already described. I know that the coalition Government are in favour of the Freedom of Information Act. Their Bible, the coalition agreement, says:

“We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act”,

to promote “greater transparency”.

To conclude, what steps are the coalition Government going to take to persuade the European Commission to change the way that its obligation to transparency is discharged in a way that is compatible with that European Court of Justice ruling earlier this month?

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, I respectfully draw the attention of noble Lords to the fact that Back-Benchers’ contributions are time-limited to seven minutes. If they exceed that, they may limit my noble friend’s ability to respond to their questions.