Higher Education and Research Bill (Third sitting)

Amanda Milling Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Marsden]

I will be very specific. What have you done to respond to the widespread criticisms of the way in which you have put the future of the research councils together, set out in the letter that Lord Selborne sent you on 30 June?

Joseph Johnson: Thanks, Gordon. I do not think your comments reflect the evidence that you have been hearing this morning and Tuesday from witnesses such as Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and others. They saw huge merits in the creation of UKRI and were unanimous in agreeing that we should incorporate Innovate UK within that body.

Of course, we received Lord Selborne’s letter and I gave a very comprehensive reply to it, which has been published and is in the public domain. We strongly believe that there are huge benefits to the business community from having a better understanding of what is going on in the research base and the opportunities that are coming out of it. We think there are huge advantages to the research base of being more aware of the needs of business. There is a big synergy there to be exploited.

[Amanda Milling]

Q Good afternoon, Minister. On Tuesday, Professor Gaskell said that Universities UK had advocated a well-regulated register of higher education providers. Do you feel that the Bill will enable that?

Joseph Johnson: Yes—one of the centrepieces of the Bill is the creation of the register. For the first time we are going to have a unified list of institutions that are recognised, that meet a defined quality standard and that are able to assure students that the institution that they are going to has been through a quality threshold. This is a really important unifying mechanism that creates coherence in what is currently a very fragmented regulatory architecture, where HEFCE regulates a number of publicly funded institutions, BIS directly regulates alternative providers and there is a third huge universe of providers who are outside of both regimes altogether.

For the first time we will have a register, which Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of UCAS, said on Tuesday would be of huge benefit to people applying to university and wanting to have some kind of assurance that the institution they were thinking of going to had been through some basic sanitary and hygiene checks.

[Carol Monaghan]

Q Having heard from the witnesses over the past couple of sittings, can you tell me what the current position is on representation of devolved Administrations on the board of UKRI?

Joseph Johnson: UKRI is a body that will represent science and research across the United Kingdom. That is in the name. We want to ensure that excellence is well represented on the board, that there is a proper understanding of the systems that are operating in all parts of the UK.

We want to ensure that there is a proper ability for the devolved Administrations to have their specific needs well understood by the board of UKRI. As you know, in the research council system there is no ex officio membership for the devolved Administrations on the boards of those bodies. We have a reserved settlement in which science and innovation are presently reserved to the United Kingdom Government. We would not want to unpick our devolution settlement in this bit of legislation on its own.