Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

We will come later in the Bill to amendments that are specifically about the powers that the Secretary of State and the OfS will be given. I am not suggesting that this amendment alone is enough to address the issue of institutional autonomy. However, in the meantime, it will provide a simple but important safeguard for the way that those duties are exercised. I sincerely hope that the Minister will accept the amendment—or, alternatively, undertake to come back with a very similar amendment when we get to Report. If that is not forthcoming, I think we will return to this issue. It is crucial for this House. Fundamentally, we are at risk of carelessly undermining a vital freedom in this country. We must guard against that very carefully.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 65 in the name of my noble friend Lord Kerslake. The most relevant interest I have to declare is that I was the first Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. I dealt with student complaints, which gave me a great deal of insight into what was going on.

Twenty-nine years have passed since the late Lord Jenkins—Roy Jenkins, the chancellors’ chancellor—secured an amendment to the Education Reform Act 1988. That Act ended the tenure that had been enjoyed by British academics. His amendment protected in law the freedom of academics to question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or the privileges they may have at their institution. That is repeated in the second half of the amendment being moved this evening, which is directed towards the OfS and the Secretary of State.

Why is it necessary to draw attention to that principle again and to re-enact it? The answer lies in the width of the risk presented in the Bill to the independence of UK higher education and in the amount of power granted to the Secretary of State and the OfS—so much more extensive than in the 1988 Act. Staff have to be free to criticise without fear the opinions of their colleagues and government policy and to publish without fear of reprisal through the closing of departments at the behest of the OfS. In later amendments to be debated in a few days’ time, we will return to the freedom of speech that universities should be securing. However, this amendment is directed, in an overarching way, to the structure that will govern our universities in future.

The Bill would allow untrammelled direction from the Secretary of State for research themes and the appointment of individual council chairs. That could, for short-term gains, limit the scope of the UK’s research functions and its innovation. When my husband was a young scientist in the 1960s, he worked for years on a strange, new and apparently useless but fascinating invention: the laser. We know now how that turned out and how it might have been nipped in the bud had there been in place an OfS regime at the time. The proposed UKRI—the new all in one—will reduce funding routes and may impact on the variety of research that is funded. If plurality of funding is diminished, the risk of taking the wrong decision is magnified, the decision process will be narrower and the diversity of perspective reduced.

We have proof of how things can go wrong: the binary line between universities under the UGC and polytechnics under local authority control and the placing of them in one funding pot; the introduction of central regulation and the auditing of teaching and research; the subordination of academic planning to deep financial controls and the increases in staff workloads despite what has been said earlier this evening—because one hour of teaching may well represent days of research, days of marking, days of seeing students, and days of working in the library and on committees. Indeed, the pressure to research that has been dominant up to now and that was brought in by the Government is responsible for the fact that people now think that teaching is not getting all the attention that it should. What the Bill is trying to do—but should not do in too rigid a way—is swing that pendulum back towards good teaching for the students.

Now we have a sad situation. In the guise of efficiency gains, so much has been lost and cut—and now the miserable replacement of grants with loans to cover living costs will knock all hopes of social mobility on the head. The amendment does no more than keep UK university regulation in line with domestic and international human rights law. The amendment is embedding freedom of thought, conscience, opinion, expression, association and assembly—familiar terms from our European and national human rights legislation. Academic freedom requires freedom from discrimination and harassment and prejudice. It is inextricably bound up with freedom of speech. It also means proper whistleblowing procedures and collegial decision-making, with academic excellence at its heart.

It also involves adherence to the principle of the universality of science—the freedom to share and carry out research without illegitimate hindrance based on irrelevant discrimination. No group of people should be excluded from scientific enterprise under this principle for reasons extraneous to the science itself—so the European Union would be in breach of that principle of the universality of science were it to place barriers in the way of contributions of UK scientists to global research, and vice versa. Of course, no university should discriminate against or boycott the scientists of any one nation. There is everything to be gained from this amendment and nothing to lose. I urge the Government to accept it.

[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.

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[Baroness Deech]

I take it upon myself to answer the noble Lord. Amendment 469, when we get to it, deals with precisely that point.

[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.

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As the new system is firmly based on risk-based regulation, the OfS and the designated quality body will assess the risks attached to all providers that apply to be on the register, with the ability to attach specific conditions of registration to providers that are directly matched to the level of risk that a provider represents. This will allow the OfS to carefully manage the entry of new providers to the regulated sector, for example by using levers such as the imposition of student numbers. Being registered is therefore intended to be an important indication of recognition. The OfS will have the necessary tools to ensure that those registered maintain high-quality standards or face deregistration. We should expect excellence from all our universities and hold them to the same high standards, rather than focusing on their legal form or their profit or non-profit status. With that more detailed explanation, for which I do not know whether I should apologise, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to withdraw his amendment.

[Baroness Deech]

Before the Minister sits down, may I take him back to his statement that there cannot be any interference by the OfS and the Government in the governance of universities because they are autonomous? However, as has often been mentioned this evening, under the 1988 Act university commissioners were sent to rip up the charters of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and perhaps of other universities too, in the interests of ending academic tenure. Despite protests, they were rewritten. It was the Government’s will, and no amount of protestations at the time about academic freedom made any difference.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

Let me give what I hope will be further reassurance that when the Office for Students is set up, as set out in the Bill in different clauses, academic autonomy will be exceptionally important. However, if there is a failing institution, the OfS will have the right to step in, but the steps it must take are long and quite onerous. I reassure the House that many steps have to be gone through before it goes down that route. I am sure we will have more debate about that.