Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I welcome this brief debate. It is crucial that we should turn our attention to different forms of access and to lifelong learning in its widest sense. The publication from the four years that I was Education and Employment Secretary that I remain most proud of is The Learning Age Green Paper. I am proud of the commitment of the then Government to the whole range of opportunities for lifelong learning.

I deeply regret that universities as a whole in this country countenanced the demise of their extramural outreach at a time when more utilitarian delivery was uppermost in people’s minds. I pay tribute to Sheffield Hallam University for its outreach, embracing those from a whole range of disadvantaged backgrounds. I declare an interest: I have a close relationship with the University of Sheffield, where I hopefully deliver some pearls of wisdom and experience from a lifetime engaged in education, and I welcome its renewed commitment to lifelong learning. However, universities using resources, expertise and facilities to reach out is still in embryo.

Digital platforms now allow us to communicate at a distance. Over past decades, the Open University has been able to link that effectively to collective study and engagement; that is a crucial part of a rounded education that we can all welcome. I hope that when the Minister responds, he will, in a wider sense than just this Bill, encourage and support universities to use those resources to reach out and become essential parts of their own community, as well reaching out internationally.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness’s amendment. This is a particularly important issue which, regrettably, has been repeatedly neglected in this House, except by my noble friend Lady Bakewell and a few others who have, from time to time, tried to cudgel the Government in debates that perhaps do not have quite so much impact as this major debate on higher education today. I have an interest as chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University which, together with the University of Sheffield, has transformed Sheffield and its workforce in the last 15 years. Many of the people who have transformed that place have of course been those who have come in part-time.

I do not want to repeat what I said in the previous sitting on Monday, but I pointed out—during the Tube strike—that we are going to have to look at driverless trains and at automation, which will happen right across the whole of industry. It has been calculated by some people that perhaps as many as nine out of 10 of the workforce will be out of their current work in the next decade. I am not quite certain whether the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, in moving her amendment, pointed out that a large proportion of the people who undertake part-time degrees are over the age of 30 and under the age of 60. We need to be skilling people as they grow older because we are now living longer. We need to ensure that that middle-aged group is educated. It is important to recognise that as long as we learn, we are useful. It is vital to support learning in an ageing society.

I wish to relate a personal story about a PhD student who I met at Imperial College last year. I asked her about the subject of her further degree as she was undertaking a very intricate project on global warming, looking at rare earth radioisotopes two miles below the seabed. She was tracking sea movements from 50 million years ago and providing crucial information on climate change using the most sensitive instruments. I thought that she must have the most splendid degree from one of the Russell group universities. When I asked her where she had taken her first degree, she said, “I was in an office and started an Open University course, which led directly to this PhD studentship”. We need to ensure that we fully support people who have the capacity to contribute to our society intellectually. At the moment, that is not happening enough.

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and Amendments 32, 41, 46 and 172, to the latter of which my name is attached. I have already spoken on this issue several times, as it is of pressing importance to me. I am president of Birkbeck, which caters for part-time study. However, I emphasise the tenor in which this concept sits within the Bill. Constantly, amendment after amendment states the purpose of the relevant clause or schedule and then says “including” part-time and lifelong learning. It is almost as if the concept were an afterthought. It would be churlish of me not to recognise that the Minister has acknowledged how important such learning is, but given its presence at the tail end of those amendments, it is as though this kind of learning were in some way an add-on, a second thought, something we had just remembered. I would like to see it elevated to a much stronger role.

At the moment, 570,000 students are studying part-time in this country, of whom 62% are over 30—it is usually that number. Of that number, 60% are female, so we are talking about students who are largely women over 30, who may have missed out on studying for a variety of reasons such as lack of ambition or motivation, childbirth or changing career patterns. That very important sector plays to the Government’s ambition to offer access to training to non-traditional students as opposed to younger students aged 18 to 20. These statistics bear out the Government’s ambition to serve people. I would also refer to another sector: the old. What are we going to do about old people who are isolated and may be depressed and live alone in the country? There is a major build-up of problems as regards how older people are to live their lives. I am proud to say that at Birkbeck the other day I handed out a degree to someone in their 90s. There is no doubt that continual learning nourishes the spirit of people who are getting older. I know of no evidence which claims that learning helps avoid dementia but I would not be surprised if such evidence came along soon. It seems to me that study and a project to enable a commitment to learning to come to fruition in one’s later years is a very good motive for lifelong learning. I ask the Minister to support it at every level.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, I said that these are complex matters and, as I said, I do not intend to lead the Committee or be led into this particular trap. Perhaps I may stress the point made by my noble friend. The Government are extremely aware of the issues in some areas of the country as regards broadband support. The Committee will be aware that separately we are working very hard on this aspect.

[Lord Winston]

Does the Minister not accept that one of the problems is the attitude to part-time learning, something that will become more and more important in our society? The Bill tends to see it as a second-rate form of education, which it clearly is not, and in the future will be even less so, particularly when we have distance learning, in which most universities are beginning to invest very heavily. The important issue is that part-time learning is not by its nature second-rate.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Lord is right. It certainly is not second rate, but I must say again that many of the other types of people who want to learn—many were mentioned today, including lone mothers—must be considered as well. That leads into a completely separate debate as to who you give priority to. The whole point of our reforms is that the OfS will be given this broad scope to cover everybody who might fall into these categories. Far from being second rate, it is very important, and I hope I have made that clear to the Committee.

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All the real surveys show that the figures for overstayers are very low, so I really cannot understand the policy. I know it derives not from this department, but from elements in the Home Office proceeding in a manner akin to the “Titanic” heading towards an iceberg. There will be a crash in due course, and we have to help them avert it. My noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendments are in some ways on the fringes of this, and other amendments have been put down, but of all the important things facing universities at the moment, almost the most important is to preserve their capacity to win their share of overseas students and to charge them economic fees where they can pay. It is a wonderful resource for this country and will continue to be so. I hope that your Lordships will remain adamant on this matter and that we may persuade the Government that they are doing, by accident I think, something which could be immensely dangerous.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, we are deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, for his remarkable contribution to the universities, particularly on this point, and to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned Imperial College, which has a very large number of students coming from Asia, but it is not just Imperial College. I have already stumbled over the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal—I suspect I am using unparliamentary language in saying that, so let me put that right now—but it is not just the universities. The Royal College of Music, for example, has one of the largest components of students coming from Asia anywhere in the country. We are funded by those students, and that great conservatoire, which is now one of the world’s three leading conservatoires in international competition, could not exist without that income. It contributes massively to our society and to our culture, and of course to the wealth of the cultural activity we have in great cities such as London. We should not forget the conservatoires, because they are part of this issue and very important. The director of the Royal College of Music has just left China and is now in Bangkok, where the college will undoubtedly be recruiting more students and getting the very best musicians—some outstanding—from countries in Asia.

When I was in America at various times last year, visiting Caltech at one point, the University of Southern California at another, UCLA and, briefly, New York, I would go into labs and see many Indian students. They said, “We would not consider now applying to Britain for a studentship. We would prefer to go to the United States, where we are welcomed. We are not actually welcome in Britain”. We need to knock on the head this issue about their being immigrants. It is of vital importance in the discussion of the Bill and I absolutely support the sentiments that have been expressed in this short debate.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I also express my strong, unequivocal support for my noble friend Lord Lucas and his amendments. I declare an interest as a senior associate member of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, which is a wonderful example of an international college. Many of our students come from countries all over the world, and many of them go back to senior positions of authority in government, the civil service and the diplomatic service—to many positions of leadership—in their own countries. They always look back to their days at St Anthony’s with pleasure and pride. We have the good fortune at the moment to have, in her last year sadly, a wonderful international warden, Margaret MacMillan, one of the great historians, particularly of the First World War. To those of your Lordships who have not read Peacemakers, or The War that Ended Peace, I commend them most warmly— I digress just briefly to say that.

What I want to do is to make plain my strong support and my, to be frank, incomprehension at the Government’s policy. This morning I sat on the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the EU Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, which received evidence from the Immigration Minister, Mr Robert Goodwill, and the Minister of State for the Brexit department, Mr Jones. Admirable people both, and in due course your Lordships will have a chance to read the evidence and to reflect on the report, but what I found completely difficult to accept was the fundamental contradiction in the arguments being put forward on the student front. My noble friend Lord Waldegrave, in his very brief but admirable speech, talked about the bogus colleges. If there was a justification for separating this, it was that, but even though others will crop up from time to time, the bogus colleges have gone, and we are now dealing with legitimate institutions of higher education, our universities in particular, to which students should be attracted from all over the world.

We were told this morning, and it has been said many times, that the Government place no limit on the students who come in. That is fine and good—we all agree with that—but if that is the case, why create a deterrent to those very students by lumping them in with those who seek to come as immigrants into this county? They have every right to seek to come, and I am deeply disturbed about all the aspects of Brexit, but that is another story entirely, and the fact is that students are different. They come not to stay but to study, and they go back to enrich their own economies and countries. Occasionally some do want to stay on for further education and some want to stay and work here, but what is wrong with that? What is the damage to our vibrant economy—which we were told about this morning by the two Ministers who came before us —in that?

My noble friend Lord Lucas has performed a signal service to your Lordships’ House in introducing his amendments as he did. It is quite clear from all those who have spoken so far that there is enormous sympathy for them. I do not want any votes tonight—I do not suppose any of your Lordships do—but I hope that if the Government cannot come up with a sensible way to accept the theme of the arguments we are putting forward tonight, your Lordships’ House will pass a suitable amendment on Report. We have not only a right but a duty to do that.

What the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, struck many a chord. This country, particularly after Brexit, is going to depend more than ever on its reputation as a centre of civilisation, a country to which all are welcome to come to contribute and learn and then go back to their countries. The respectable part of the imperial legacy is something in which we can all take pride. I sincerely hope that the Minister will be able to give us an encouraging response today even though, clearly, we accept that he cannot give a commitment.

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[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, referred to what happened to him in 1981. I say to him that not everyone in the Labour Party or the so-called liberal intelligentsia failed to support him; I was strongly in favour of the move to charge overseas students fees. I think he was right and we have all benefited as a result.

I want to go back to another point in my career. When I was responsible for the Department for Education and Employment, we launched the Prime Minister’s initiative to recruit far more international students, and to do so in a way that would be more effective than when individual universities just went out one by one and competed with each other in trying to recruit these students. We worked out a system, we set targets for the numbers that we would try to recruit and we met those targets before the deadline for doing so. This was one of the really important contributions that Tony Blair made when he was Prime Minister. It derived from a visit to China when he met some former Chinese students who had studied in this country and was impressed by their commitment to the UK and their pleasure in describing what they had got out of being students here. He realised that if you do this well, you actually make friends for life. That is what we should aim to do when it comes to recruiting overseas students in large numbers.

I was going to make many of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith, about the value to individual higher education institutions of bringing in a wide and diverse range of students from all over the world. It is of great benefit to British students. I disagree with him on one point, though: he referred to the “leading universities” doing this, by which I assume he means the research universities. No, it is not just about the leading universities; there are benefits to British students in all universities from getting to know students from around the world. In fact, the benefits are greater in those universities that do not have many advantaged students who have already been able to travel with or without their parents. When I was vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich, we had a great many students from inner London and outer London who had never been abroad. In my view, for them to be able to meet students from around the world was an enormously enriching experience.

We must look at this not just in a slightly elitist way in respect to the “best and the brightest”, a phrase that I do not like very much. It is about all students, including those who come from the developing world who may not have had a fantastically strong secondary education—they too benefit from going to British universities. This is why so many of the growing middle class in India have wanted to send their students to this country. As someone who has spent quite a lot of time in India and who believes that it is a great country with which we should associate in as many ways as we can, I think it is a disaster that as a result of the visa policies of the Home Office over the past seven or eight years we have lost huge numbers of Indian students. We will live to regret that. I strongly support the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and hope that we can put in the Bill a requirement that the Office for Students should report on the number of international students coming here and what they are bringing in terms of financial benefit, let alone all the other invisible benefits that we have all talked about.

I have one final point. I agree with those Members of this House who have said it would be rather a good idea to welcome some of these students to stay here in employment. We will benefit from what they bring because they will be skilled and hard-working and will have knowledge that some of the other young professionals who are coming out of our universities do not have, because they come from every corner of the world.

[Lord Winston]

Is it not a factor that the Home Office does not have proper data on which students go to which universities from these other countries, which makes it very difficult to explain what we are doing and why it is so valuable to both them and us?

[Baroness Blackstone]

I cannot speak for the Home Office on the care it takes in collection of data. Others will know better, but I suspect that it is making very foolish adjustments every day of the week about the overseas students that we have in this country and their potential threat. They are not a threat: they are a benefit and advantage to us all.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

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

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I add my wholehearted support to these amendments. Further education is all too often the Cinderella of the education world, yet further education colleges do an absolutely phenomenal job across a very wide range of students and subjects, so having them represented on this body is absolutely essential. I also support the adult and part-time education students, who form a critical and very important part of the student body. They have different sorts of views and needs from those who are the typical 18 year-olds going to university.

There is also the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made about vocational and professional education, which often links very closely with higher education institutions but has a different sort of ethos and different cohorts of people. All these amendments to add to the membership of the OfS board are critical, and I hope that the Minister will look favourably on these amendments.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said about part-time students. We will come back to that subject in more detail during these debates. Of all days, today we should think about that really seriously. London has been brought to a standstill by a transport strike, and it is only a matter of time before the drivers of those trains, not merely the people and guards and the other people on the platforms, will no longer be working, because science and technology is advancing rapidly. That is a model for our society, and people will have to retrain.

In my 15 years’ involvement with Sheffield Hallam University, one thing that I have learned above all is that people taking part-time courses have transformed their lives in gaining skills, coming from relatively manual jobs, or jobs with a low level of skill. It is vital that we find every possibility of supporting those students. I urge the Government to consider that during the passage of this Bill. I also briefly defer to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and congratulate him on his interest in school students, which has been long-standing and of great importance.

From my experience, I cannot emphasise enough the lack of aspiration that so many school students have because they do not really believe that they can go to university. That is why it is so important that we have the bridge between school and university which this minor amendment would help to promote. There are all sorts of reasons why that is important. We may have the best school teachers in the world, but so many children go home to a desert where there is no aspiration. Their parents ask them: “Why aren’t you going out to work; why aren’t you earning money; why aren’t you supporting the household?”. It is extremely important to find ways of encouraging people from those sorts of backgrounds to understand that they should be considering further or higher education. Having people on this new body who can help universities interface with schools and teachers to give better career guidance would be a blessing and it should be incorporated in the Bill.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with great relief that I rise this time to support the amendments proposed by own side; I have confidence in all of them. I also emphasise the importance of part-time students. They are a key part of the business of BPP University—and, like other universities, we suffered a great fall in numbers without changing our offering. We have changed our offering in every way we know how but we are still not increasing the numbers and it will take some work to find out why. In passing, I observe that I have great respect for the work of Select Committees, but I am really not sure that submitting the prospective chairman of whatever this body is going to be called to one is depoliticising the appointment. Select Committees are a fairly political way of doing anything and I do not have much confidence in that suggestion.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I just add a few brief words in support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I declare an interest as a former chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, although I do not think that his amendment would extend to Scotland for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, mentioned. In that connection, I should point out that since Clause 117 makes it clear that the Bill extends to Wales as well as England, it may be that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, should extend his amendment to cover Wales as well, because I am not sure that there is any difference between Welsh institutions and English institutions for this purpose.

That aside, I commend the way in which the amendment is crafted, particularly the first paragraph because, as it was pointed out, it is directed to the duties to be performed by the Secretary of State. One of the problems revealed by the earlier debate is that of universities being required to do certain things that might attract all sorts of extremely unwelcome litigation. However, this amendment is directed where it should be directed and for that reason, as well as all the other points made by the noble Lord and by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, I hope the Minister will take it very seriously.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am wedged between two lawyers. I absolutely support the amendment spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. One thing concerns me and it may concern the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, as well. The rise of racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish behaviour in universities in recent years causes us great concern. I wonder whether the phrase,

“the freedom of academic staff within the law”,

will be adequate to control some of these outbursts, which are not necessarily exactly illegal but are certainly very discreditable and dangerous for universities. Would the noble Lord like to address that?

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[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in his Amendment 65. There should be such a duty on the Secretary of State, although it makes me think about the duty on the Lord Chancellor to protect the independence of the judiciary. We do not see that being lived up to in the way that we would like, so just placing duties on Secretaries of State does not always deliver the outcomes that we want. But I certainly support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.

I want to give some comfort to my noble friend Lord Stevenson because I share many of the concerns expressed in his amendment. I am not in favour of for-profit universities: I should make that very clear. The ideal of the university is so precious and important to our nation. We should ask ourselves this question: where is a world-class university that is for-profit? The answer is that there is not one—not Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge.

[Lord Winston]

MIT?

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

MIT has some provisions in its statutes that ensure that the money is fed back into MIT for research at the highest level. If that were part of the standards that we expect of the new private universities, one might feel rather differently. But my concern is that, if you speak to Americans in the field of education and higher education in particular, they look with envious eyes. Yes, they have grand universities, wonderful new liberal arts colleges and some great state universities, but they feel that in Britain we have, across the board, a much higher standard of university than can be seen in parts of the United States.

One thing that concerns them is that they went down this road themselves some 10 years ago. They let the business world bring all its entrepreneurship into the university world and by God, they are regretting it now. They have started having scandals. It has even reached our ears about Trump University, but only because Mr Trump’s name has of course become rather more familiar for other reasons. He was sued by students on the basis that the university set itself up claiming that it would deliver education in the world of business, but in fact the students were absolutely short-changed and exploited. Many of them were ordinary working folk who had thought that it would advance their careers, and in fact they were taken to the cleaners.

A pay-off is now taking place, but there are other cases in the pipeline. We should be very wary about where this will take us. There is the idea that universities could set up without any probationary period to show that they are acting in a proper way. My noble friend Lord Stevenson suggests in Amendment 2 that there should be a period of four years. I certainly agree that there should be a serious period of time to see whether these new institutions will be up to the standard we want this country to be recognised for.

I rather like the idea that “UK universities” will become the kitemark for institutions that follow the traditional pattern, but I am afraid that I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the pursuit of modernity has to be approached with some caution. I say this particularly when remembering so well the New Labour years. I regret the mistake made by New Labour in its enthusiasm for markets. I have great enthusiasm for markets and I like all aspects of them in their right place, but I do not like their consolidating interests such as the utilities. I do not like markets where you do not get real competition, and I certainly do not like their entering areas of our public life like education and health, where the result is in fact a diminution of investment. So I am very concerned about what the Bill means.

I appreciate what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said earlier about his children and their friends going to universities where they felt rather short-changed because they did not get the teaching they expected. I am happy that the Government are seeking to pursue good teaching by creating the right kind of framework, and I have no objection to some of the things proposed in the Bill. However, I am concerned about autonomy and the potential for interference by Government and bodies that are basically a part of Government. I am also really concerned about this business of introducing into the sector profit-making universities which basically will be a milch cow for hedge funders and the like. I have no hesitation in saying that I am concerned about us going down this road, and I support the attempt by my noble friend Lord Stevenson to find a way through that will reconcile the mistake that Labour made when it said that profit-making universities could be brought into the system. I do not think we will relish that in the years to come.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

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

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see the Minister for Universities standing listening to our debate on this important issue. We are grateful for his attention to our comments. I will make two points from examples of my own experience; sometimes the House benefits greatly from that. I am very much aware of what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, just said about Germany in the 1930s and the effect of government on the universities, which affected German universities for a long time after the war.

In the mid-1970s, I was a visiting professor for a year at a university in Belgium—one of the oldest universities in Europe. The department in which I worked was one of the world’s leading departments in reproductive physiology, to which came Spaniards, Italians, Brits, Americans, somebody from Australia, a large number of people from South America and some people who managed to get out of the Eastern bloc. The department worked on a major world problem—that of contraception at a time when the World Health Organization predicted that there might be as many as 100 billion people on the globe by the end of the next century. In addition, at that time in vitro fertilisation was not possible. It was a Catholic university. The head of the department, who was probably one of the most famous leading scientists and clinicians in reproductive biology in Europe, faced a considerable threat from the Church in that city. Eventually, with government support, not only was he passed over but he had to leave that environment as a result of the extreme pressure which came partly from government and partly from the Church. That kind of thing could happen again. The head of the department ended up mostly in private practice. The numerous foreign students from all over the world left that department and its huge prestige was also lost. Therefore, freedom of speech and expression in universities should be written into the Bill. I hope that the Government will look at this issue very carefully and perhaps encompass it in a definition.

The amendment refers to universities making “a contribution to society”. I work at Imperial College London and the huge contribution that has been made to society through connections with schools is extremely rewarding. As we spread our word, that has made a massive difference to the aspirations of young people, not only in the East End of London but right across the United Kingdom. More and more universities are becoming involved in developing greater connections with society. That is important for undergraduates and school students. It is vital to extend those connections. That is another reason why the wording to which I have referred, or something similar, must be included in the Bill.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, it is perhaps not surprising that those of us who are academics are concerned about definitions because one of the things we always teach our students is to define their terms. Hence, I support this amendment which seeks to define what we are talking about. At the same time, we should recognise that over the centuries universities have changed. In England, between the 12th and the 19th centuries, there were just two universities—Oxford and Cambridge—which served largely as institutions for educating people for careers in the Church or in canon law. The modern university as we understand it, an institution which combines research and teaching, was essentially invented in Germany by Alexander von Humboldt in 1810, when he founded the University of Berlin. However, in spite of the changing details of what universities do, they have certain enduring qualities and properties that we should cherish and ensure are retained during the passage of the Bill.

I offer two quotes. We have already heard one excellent quote from the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. One of my quotes is from the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield, when he was offered an honorary degree by the University of Sheffield in 1946. He said, among other things about a university:

“It is a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see; where seekers and learners alike, banded together in the search for knowledge, will honour thought in all its finer ways, will welcome thinkers in distress or in exile, will uphold ever the dignity of thought and learning, and will exact standards in these things”.

That is the spirit in which, during the passage of the Bill, we should consider what a university is. My second quote reverts to perhaps the most famous treatise on universities, written by John Newman in the middle of the 19th century. I will not attempt to read the whole book to your Lordships, but just one brief quote. He says that,

“a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life”.

These are high-flown ambitions for universities, but ones that we should uphold today, not resorting to a purely instrumental view of universities that are there for economic benefit and training in technical skills.

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[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not taking part at Second Reading, but your Lordships will remember that 6 December was the day after we had the long debate on the composition of this House on 5 December, and I thought it would be trying your Lordships’ patience too much.

I shall speak very briefly. I want to make one point only, and it is this: we have before us a Bill that is riddled with imperfections and an amendment which is far from perfect. We have the great good fortune of having a Minister of State in charge of this Bill—to whom tribute has rightly been paid on a number of occasions, including by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson—who is following our proceedings assiduously and in person. I think it is impossible to conceive that he will not take note of what is said today when he discusses it with the Minister in this House. It is important that this crucial point—the spirit of this amendment—is taken on board and considered.

However, we have not a convention but a general habit in your Lordships’ House not to amend in Committee but rather to give Ministers the opportunity to reflect and consider, and then to press, and to press with vigour, on Report. Many is the time when I have found it necessary to vote against the Government on Report. It may well be that that will occur many times during Report on this Bill, but I do not think that on the very first day that this Bill is before us we should tie anyone’s hands by inserting an amendment which it has been admitted even by its advocates needs improvement. Let us try in the conversations that take place both within and without this House to get it right.

There is a great deal to get right. This is an imperfect Bill that threatens some of our cherished academic freedoms, even if inadvertently. There has never been a time when we needed vigorous universities more than we need them now defending freedom of speech. That is necessary, and we are reminded even this very day by some of the comments on how philosophy should be taught and on which philosophers should be exalted and which put down to accept that much is rotten in this state and we need to get it right.

[Lord Winston]

I take a bit of issue with the noble Lord on this occasion. Does he not think that this definition will pervade the whole of our discussion throughout the Bill, which is why pushing this in Committee may be completely justified, even though it is not usual practice in this House?

[Lord Cormack]

Of course it will pervade our discussions throughout the Bill, in Committee and on Report, and it may well be necessary to move a refined amendment on Report and to vote on it—of course it may. But do not let us tie a Minister of State’s hands when he has shown himself anxious and eager to listen to what your Lordships say. We are having a good debate, and have had some notable speeches. Let us not push this to a vote this afternoon.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I must thank the Minister, the honourable Jo Johnson, for his courtesy and patience in seeing so many of us beforehand and in such detail—that was deeply appreciated. I declare an interest as chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University and note that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, has just pointed out how much the university has done for the local community—that essential contact with communities is one issue for universities. I am also chairman of the Royal College of Music in London and am employed by Imperial College London partly as a researcher and partly running an outreach programme.

It seems completely bonkers to have this Bill at this time. If we had it in a year and a half’s time, I think that we would be discussing very different issues, one of which, clearly, is that all three of those organisations that I am intimately involved with, like most other higher education institutions, are deeply concerned about the impact of Brexit.

I shall make three points, the first on the Haldane principle. I had the privilege of being on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 10 years. One issue for us was the independence of our decisions. It was always a problem when the Haldane principle was threatened by individual Ministers. I remember, for example, the issue of graphene in the north-west of England, when quite a large sum of money was taken from the budget, but the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council had to pay for the running costs thereafter when we were dealing with flat cash. While our current Minister may be trusted, it is clear that when we come to look at amendments to the Bill we will have to make certain that the Haldane principle is firmly embedded in it.

Secondly, there is the issue of innovation and business. I am very sceptical about this. Of course, as a member of Imperial College, I recognise that we are doing a tremendous amount in building innovation. We have a new establishment on our new university campus in west London looking at innovation and business. Of course, so much innovation does not come as something planned. If you take the 10 great inventions of the last 50 or 60 years, none came by any kind of planning beforehand. The oral contraceptive pill was not designed as such; in fact, nobody had the slightest idea that it would totally change our society. The internet is another example of something that has completely democratised our society in a way that we could not have imagined beforehand but that also carries certain threats. Ultrasound for looking inside the body was thought of only as the result of somebody coming back from the war having done work as a bomb navigator looking at submarines.

Another example is the laser, which was first thought of in 1905 by Albert Einstein. It was not until 1960 that somebody made a laser—and they did not have the slightest idea how to use it. Now we think of the laser as absolutely ubiquitous. It runs the internet and the telephone system, and we bank with it. We use it to measure distances and to build buildings. Many of your Lordships’ will have had operations at the back of the eye. We are using it in quantum computing. In my laboratory at Imperial College, we use it every day to look at details of the human embryo that we cannot see with a light microscope—with exquisite beauty. Of course, everybody also uses a laser printer. It is a ubiquitous, important instrument but not something we could have predicted. Therefore, you cannot do this as the result of having an institute of innovation.

Thirdly, there is the missed opportunity in the Bill—one of many—that we have failed to understand that the real issue in our society is access to universities and how we manage the real issue of school students who have never set foot inside a mysterious, arcane building: a university. This year—it is not a boast but my PA told me this week—I have addressed a total around the United Kingdom of 35,000 schoolchildren in different situations. So many of them have not the slightest idea about going to university. At Imperial College, we try with our outreach to build a lab for them to come into. Every university should do that but the Government should imprint something like it in a Bill of this kind so that that sort of access is available to students to enable them to come in and understand why they should have that aspiration. At present, the Bill does nothing about aspiration. There is no connection between the school and university systems. That is a major fault in the Bill.

However, we will have an interesting time in the next stages of the Bill. I look forward to seeing some really useful amendments. I hope to see how we can adjust the Bill to make it more workable.

Sex and Relationships Education

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Again, my noble friend raises a good point. I shall certainly take that back.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as somebody who leads the outreach programme in schools from Imperial College. We do a tremendous amount of work with teenagers around the age of 16. What is absolutely shocking is the very low number of girls who even know when ovulation occurs. The ignorance of the menstrual cycle and basic biology is striking. Is this not another example of the narrowness of the curriculum in schools that prevents a wider education generally and is very important in these matters?

[Lord Nash]

I am fully aware of the programme that the noble Lord referred to at Imperial College, and I know that it is very much valued by the schools that participate in it. I am a bit shocked to hear what he said. Of course, these matters should be taught in science but clearly the issue he has raised is unacceptable and we need to look at it further.

Education: Henley Review

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The Prime Minister recently announced a cultural enrichment programme through the cultural citizens programme. I think that the noble Baroness should wait to see how that develops.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Royal College of Music. It is very clear that music does more than merely help to educate people; it provides all sorts of added benefits to education in general and collaboration between people. Have the Government considered helping the conservatoires in the way that Darren Henley has suggested, by doing more outreach in schools and supporting that sort of work which goes on but at the moment is very inadequately supported?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. It is well documented that music helps not only the cultural development of pupils but in matters such as working together in teams when they work in orchestras and choirs. I shall take back the noble Lord’s point and make sure that it is looked at.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very good to see the noble Lord, Lord Prior of Brampton, on the Front Bench. I am just sorry that he will not be crossing swords with me this evening, but no doubt there will be occasions in the future when we will have an opportunity to argue. I must say that he replaces a wonderful man, the noble Earl, Lord Howe.

I want to draw the House’s attention to a matter which most people regard as trivial, although it is not trivial to the people concerned. There are around 900,000 pregnancies a year in this country, and something like 20% to 25% of those end in miscarriage or pregnancy loss. One in eight couples in Britain has failure or problems in getting pregnant. What is happening at the moment is absolutely shocking and the National Health Service should be doing much more about it. I would like to describe a model that can be used on a wider basis in the NHS. In his introduction, my noble friend Lord Hunt pointed out that the NHS has, unhelpfully, been used as a political football. I ask noble Lords to forgive me for saying that but it is not directed at the Government as it has happened on all sides. We tend to make all sorts of financial claims which are very difficult to justify. I will say no more than that.

It is not understood how serious a matter it is for those who are trying to conceive. Initially there is a degree of anxiety and then there is a loss of self-esteem. People who are infertile, or having difficulty with miscarriage, start to have a great deal of pain. It is not a physical pain but a pain which erodes their relationships with their parents, with their partner and with other people—so much so that it is very common for people having difficulty getting pregnant to be unable to socialise with their peers. For example, they do not go to dinner parties or do the usual things because the discussion is about children and schools. They become increasingly isolated.

One aspect of that isolation is, of course, the effect on their sexual relationship. I must tell your Lordships that in my experience it is extremely common to see men become impotent and women suffer loss of orgasm as a result of this condition. What is worse, of course—it happens frequently to those who are having difficulty getting pregnant—is that they are likely to miscarry, and they are treated abominably when it happens. They go into hospital to have their uteruses scraped out. Normally they have to wait until the end of the list, sometimes overnight, because the staff are too busy to deal with them. Because it is so common, most people do not see what a tragedy it is for the individual. I should say that it is very common for a woman who has miscarried, and sometimes her husband as well, to remember the date of the miscarriage in the following years and, while not celebrating it, recognising it as a date when something significant happened. I have seen people with infertility problems who have miscarried 10 or 15 pregnancies, and that loss is massive. In a way, that is what happens during in vitro fertilisation as well, because once a woman has had an embryo transfer, she will fantasise that she is pregnant. When her period then comes, it is a shocking psychological injury.

At the moment, as your Lordships know, provision in the National Health Service is inadequate. I think that it is about time we were honest. We should decide which treatments are actually going to be provided and which are not. It is important to recognise that the way we account for so much in the health service, including in vitro fertilisation, does not seem to be justified. For example, in one area IVF treatment costs £1,000 to the health service while in another it costs £6,000. I would like confirmation that this really happens, but it is what I have been told. Several people in senior positions in the health service have said to me that IVF treatments and abortions pay for pregnancy care because the budget is not big enough. There is a curious irony in that.

The NHS website covering infertility is really quite shocking. In the first sentence, women are advised that they should not worry about getting pregnant until they have had unprotected sex for at least two years or 12 months of artificial insemination and have not yet got pregnant. There is no evidence that artificial insemination is any use at all in the treatment of infertility. In fact, the Dutch figures suggest that people who are having sex naturally are just as likely to get pregnant. Much mention is made of lifestyle, but generally it is not really important. Further, we screen people for conditions like chlamydia. I would like to know how much that screening is costing the National Health Service, because in my experience as someone who has worked with infertile people for 40 years, I have seen no serious evidence that chlamydia definitely causes infertility in its acute stages. It may occasionally be possible for it to leave scarring.

There is a conflict of interests. People go to an NHS clinic, and they fail. Overall, there is a 25% chance of getting pregnant, so most people will fail. The same practitioners will then be operating in a private clinic where the same patients will then go afterwards for continuity. It is therefore not in everyone’s interests to see success. It is a massive issue and we need to address it. Sadly, however, the regulatory authority—the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority—has been extremely bad at regulating the cost of IVF treatment in the private sector, where at the moment the prices are escalating. People are paying as much as £9,000 or £10,000 for a cycle of treatment, particularly if there are added diagnostic procedures, most of which are of unproven value. Examples are biopsy of the embryo and immunological procedures that are not justified, along with a whole range of other issues, which the NHS actually licenses, but in fact they are research procedures for which I do not believe people should be charged.

It is important for us to consider what the real costs of procedures are throughout the health service. I do not think that we know the figures, and what is happening in in vitro fertilisation is probably happening on a much bigger scale in a whole range of treatments. Because we now have a considerable private practice sector providing treatments within the National Health Service, it is extremely important that the service should understand precisely what the cost of an individual treatment should be. Unless we know that, we will continue to see spiralling costs, as well as the problems of all the people who are not getting treatment. Imagine having one cycle of IVF and finding out that you are no longer eligible for any more, which is the case in many health authorities. The chances of success are 25%. Would we give up a cancer therapy after administering 25% of the drugs, or perhaps 25% of the treatment required for arthritis? We continue with treatments until they are successful. That must be the standard that we need to consider.

Childcare: Early-years Funding

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Much as I would be delighted to enter into a lengthy correspondence with the noble Lord on those rather esoteric matters, I shall not do so. It is clear that we are at the start of a negotiation between the Government and funders and we need to make sure that the funders are able to provide a good service without making too much profit. I am sure the party opposite will be delighted to hear that.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not feel that the Minister has answered that question entirely clearly. In the previous Session, the Government cut the funding for Sure Start. Sure Start was clearly shown and validated by Jay Belsky and others at University College London to have a major impact on social cohesion, to prevent certain crimes as children grew older, and to have some benefits for education as well as for cohesion in families. There are measures that can seen, and it seems a pity that that funding was cut. Can the Minister assure us that that will be relooked at so that re-funding can be considered?

[Lord Nash]

Under the previous Government, over the past five years, we increased the provision of childcare by 230,000 places since 2009, and the sector is thriving. We are determined to make sure that every working parent has the opportunity to have affordable childcare.

Early Years Intervention

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I will refer to two groups of experiments. First, in the 1960s, there was a classic neuroscientific experiment where newborn kittens were blindfolded for various lengths of time. After a short time of complete darkness, once the blindfold was removed, there were permanent changes in the visual cortex of the brain. That could not be fully corrected by any subsequent exposure to light. Although I completely agree with my noble friend Lord Giddens about the early years not being a special part, none the less, there are key experiences that we need during development which are not entirely ruled out by the arguments being made.

Secondly, I point out that that is exactly why I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I do not believe that it is as simple as he makes out. This is a very competitive area. I think that I can demonstrate that by the most amazing report done in 2001 by Lars Bygren of Sweden, who looked at a village in the far north of Sweden, near the Gulf of Bothnia. He showed that of males aged nine who were subjected to a good harvest during the period that he studied in the late 1800s and early 1900s, their paternal grandchildren, the sons, had a shorter longevity than any other members of the family. That is an extraordinary finding and suggests that there is programming. At the time, the report was not taken seriously, but since then a number of interesting epigenetic experiments have been carried out which show that many things that we inherit not directly through our DNA but through the way that the genes function make a massive difference.

For example, Gregory Dunn, in Pennsylvania, has recently published a study in which he shows that an obese great-grandmother mouse passes on a trait through only her male children which causes their grandchildren, if they are female, to be obese. Obesity is a very complicated issue. This will apply to all sorts of areas of inheritance—it could well apply to cognition as well. The field of epigenetics is extremely confusing. That is why we need to be very careful not to make snap judgments about the complexity of early childhood learning. That is borne out by all sorts of other experiments which I do not have time to address.

With regard to environment, I am surprised that the millennium cohort study has not been mentioned already; your Lordships will be aware of it, I am sure. It has looked at 19,000 children born since 2000-01. That study, funded by the ESRC, and a very good example of British cohort studies—one of the reasons why we want to support British research—has been a mine for all sorts of overseas investigators in France and elsewhere who have used those data. For example, it looked at parenting, childcare, school choice, behaviour, cognitive development and health. It looked at those children at nine months, three years, five years, seven years and nine years. It bears out some of the things that my noble friend Lord Giddens said. Although there may be serious evidence of undoubted changes in cognition in early years—certainly between three and five—by the age of seven, that can often be adjusted by other factors.

[Lord Giddens]

I point out that we are not a team and it is coincidental that we are sitting next to one another.

[Lord Winston]

I thought that in a time-limited debate the noble Lord would not interrupt me, but I forgive him as he is a noble friend.

My point is that a whole range of claims are made by all sorts of authorities about maternal health and how it affects cognition, breastfeeding, socialisation, social recognition and play. Undoubtedly, when there is severe deprivation—for example, in Romania—there is clear evidence of massive changes. Nelson and his group at Harvard University have shown clearly that good fostering makes a massive difference when a child has been in institutional care for a long period but, sadly, most of those children never recover completely—certainly, in their ability to deal with emotion, stress, some aspects of cognition and so on.

Although I argue that we certainly need to do more about early years learning, it is very important that successive Governments focus this work in the best possible way to have the key access to those most at risk. That is one reason why the Sure Start programme was a good start in trying to do that.