Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to have added my name to the hugely important amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I, too, regret that the noble Lord, Lord Patten, cannot be here due to ill-health, and we of course wish him well.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, gave a powerful and comprehensive introduction to the amendment, the content of which we have discussed many times in your Lordships’ House with agreement from all parts of the Chamber. The Bill presents us with a great opportunity to address the concerns expressed in debate and in various Select Committees of both Houses. For example, in recent years, six parliamentary committees have recommended the removal of students from the net migration target.

Apart from the Government, I have spoken to no one who is against the measures in the amendment: quite the contrary, there is strong support. I have spoken to overseas and UK students, academics, administrative staff of higher education institutions, people working for the bodies responsible for standards and quality, and many of our citizens from all backgrounds in different parts of the country. They understand, as my noble friend Lord Darzi said at Second Reading, that we must secure and sustain our ability to excite, attract and retain the world’s greatest minds. This is fundamental to the excellence of the UK university system.

Like the polling undertaken by UUK, my conversations provide clear evidence that even those people who are anxious about immigration welcome foreign students and do not think they should be included in the migration figures. They do not want immigration rules that are any more restrictive than the current ones placed on undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics: not now nor in future, when our immigration policy is revised to deal with Brexit. To use somewhat unparliamentary language, it is a no-brainer.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, the case for the shift in policy set out in the amendment is unanswerable. The problem of bogus students studying at institutions has, thanks to government action, been dealt with. We still await the results of the consultation on the study immigration route and a firm rebuttal of the destabilising statement made by the Home Secretary at the Conservative Party conference, but the statistics on overstaying students are, to say the least, questionable, and new data demonstrate that the number of overstayers is negligible.

Undergraduate and postgraduate students are visitors, not economic migrants. Their contribution to our higher education institutions is enormous: not just the fee income, which enables universities to thrive and innovate, but their economic impact on the wider community; the culture they bring, which enriches the experience of our students; the soft power that lasts a lifetime; and the huge addition to and influence on the invaluable research being undertaken in our universities, which affects the economic and social well-being of our country, our capacity to deliver industrial policy and so much more.

It is absolutely clear that we should and, indeed, must welcome overseas students, especially as we begin life in a brave new global Britain, where collaboration and soft power assume a greater importance. The Minister can say until he is blue in the face that overseas students are welcome, that there is no cap on the figures and that our offer compares favourably with our competitors. The fact is that even if all those things were true, the perception is very different. We can all cite numerous examples of potential students now choosing to study elsewhere. The statistics given by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, are clear evidence of this.

If the Government agree to the amendment, this perception will be changed immediately and the flow of Indian students and others now choosing to study elsewhere will be stemmed. I hope the Minister will not rely on the argument about best practice in migration calculations, which requires us to follow the stipulations of the UN. This has always been a weak argument, but post-referendum, when the Government proudly assert their determination to take back control, it is risible—likewise, the Minister’s statement that it would be inappropriate for the Government to seek to influence how statistics are compiled. What are the Government for?

The amendment would provide a strong signal in the increasingly important and competitive higher education market that this country really welcomes international students.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment, as I did in Committee. I add my regrets that the noble Lord, Lord Patten, is not here and wish him well. My support comes for all the important reasons set out so persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay—and it was evidence-based persuasion, which is always the very best sort.

Our higher education sector has derived immense benefit from collaboration with European research establishments—not just financial, but benefit in research, scholarship and international understanding and good relations. In this new, uncertain world, those relationships are ever more important.

We have discussed international students at length; they are valued and valuable and should in no way be deterred by any undue immigration categorisations or controls. In the light of the overwhelming view not just of this House but of people around the country in all the messages we have heard, I hope the Minister can assure us that the amendment will be accepted.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

The purpose of my Amendment 151 is, by collecting data and publishing it, to drive improvement and collaboration. That has been urged on me by several universities. They feel that there is another way—that we do not need to proceed by confrontation if the universities and the Home Office will agree to work together. That is something that we should insist on. Particularly given what we are going to spend the rest of today doing, this is not a time for argument, however hallowed by time that argument is; it is a time for pulling together for the good of the United Kingdom. This is not a one-sided thing; it means that the great universities really have to join in the great campaign that the Government run to support the whole of British education abroad. At the moment, it is really supported only by those who do not have sufficient of a reputation to justify marketing on their own. For this to succeed and for the good of the nation, we need the great universities to join in. There are a few which have and a few more on the periphery, but it has been a shameful show, by and large.

We need universities to recognise that, in their alumni, they have an enormous ability to help us to trade internationally. This is not something that they should seek to keep to themselves for their own commercial interests, although, obviously, that is important. This is a time when they should actively look for ways in which to make this available to the nation. However, as was seen in Committee, this is not the case, and universities really need to recognise that they have a role to play in helping the nation over the next few years.

Universities also have a role to play in supporting the immigration system. It is not there, like some tax-avoiding man in the pub, to be gamed to see how much money you can make out of it by taking the money from overseas students and not shouldering the burdens. I know that universities are better at this than they used to be, but they are by no means perfect. They are at the focus of a lot of people coming into this country. As a House, we are offering Amendment 150, which I shall support wholeheartedly—but there needs to be reciprocation from universities; they need to recognise that cheating on immigration is the same as cheating in examinations. They need, for the good of the country and of themselves, to get wholeheartedly behind supporting that concept.

The Home Office, as we all know, is not set on collaboration. I asked the Home Secretary a question a month ago in a meeting as to whether the Home Office would collaborate with universities, and she said that it would. I wrote her a follow-up letter to which she has not replied. I think that that is pretty typical of the attitude at the moment. It seems to think that it is in a little box and that all it has is its responsibility to keep people out of this country, but it is not true. At this moment, everything is all our responsibility; we must all help the Home Office to do what it has to do, and it must help us to do what we have to do to make a success of leaving the European Union.

The Home Office is, to a substantial extent, at the front sales desk for universities. It talks directly to the customers who universities wish to attract, but it runs an antagonistic website; it has impenetrable documentation and treacle-filled systems in which it can take six months for an appeal to be heard. It refuses visas on the basis of unanswerable questions such as, “What modules do you expect to take?”. Nobody knows that until they have had a bit of experience of the university and the modules may not even be set. There are even some cases where students have been told that they are being refused a visa because the equivalent courses are cheaper in their home country and they ought to be following them. This is not collaboration in any sense of the word.

I hope that we will achieve a notable victory on Amendment 150, but when it comes back to this House we should be looking not for victory at the end but for reconciliation. We need the Home Office and universities to be working together for the good of us and for each other.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, this amendment goes to the heart of what the Bill is all about. Let us set aside for a moment the questions of fees, numbers, quangos and validations. The Bill is ostensibly about teaching excellence and academic freedom. We take it as implicit—the league tables confirm it—that our universities are among the very best in the world. Some of them are consistently found in the top 10, alongside American universities. We are united in wanting to preserve our excellence, as the vote of a few moments ago showed. We want to preserve it for its own sake and because it is a valuable, international attraction, embedding our intellectual values in cohort after cohort of future world leaders who come here to study. But you cannot have academic freedom, as now included in the Bill, or teaching excellence without freedom of speech. That, as I have repeatedly warned in this Chamber over the last couple of years, is in danger. Sometimes it is farcical gagging of speech and other times it is very dangerous.

The Bill will rank universities’ teaching skills as gold, silver, bronze and ineligible. There exists another ranking—that of freedom of speech—in our universities, which is, in my opinion, to be taken even more seriously as an indicator of excellence. The free speech university rankings 2017 examine all our universities according to the following criteria: bullying and harassment policies; equal opportunities policies; students unions’ attitude to no-platform policies; safe space; student codes of conduct; bans on controversial speakers and newspapers; and even expulsion of students on the grounds of their controversial views or statements. The sampled universities are then ranked: “red” means a university that is hostile to free speech and free expression; “amber” means a university that chills free speech and free expression by issuing guidance with regards to appropriate speech; and “green” is for the other universities which place no restrictions on free speech and expression, other than where it is unlawful.

Sixty-one universities, or 63%, actively censor speech. The censoring is either by the university administrations or by the students themselves. The examples of censoriousness are well known, whether it is the silencing of a Muslim woman calling for reform of religious attitudes towards women, the playful adoption of foreign dress or cuisine, mentions of transgender, the likelihood of blasphemy, or even complaints about censorship itself. We all remember the suspension of Sir Tim Hunt and the LSE lecturer who was silenced when his views about welfare were found to be likely to be unacceptable. Violence met Israeli peace activists speaking at UCL and KCL.

At the other end of the scale, hate speech is being heard unchallenged. A recent review of people convicted of terrorism found that a significant number were in education at the time of the offence. Student Rights logged 27 speaker events in London in four recent months where speakers referred to homosexuality in the most derogatory and punitive terms, and defended convicted terrorists. That is unlawful speech and universities are not always stopping it. My amendment, if accepted, would incidentally clarify, limit and strengthen the Prevent policy, which is likely to be reviewed because it would single out unlawful speech as a target of prohibition rather than the more woolly “extremism”. In sum, there is no point pursuing teaching excellence and academic freedom, in ranking universities gold, silver and bronze, if at the same time their real freedom and intellectual excellence comes out red or amber. These rankings are known internationally.

The Government maintain that my amendment is unnecessary because the required laws are already in place. I submit that not only are they ineffectual but there is a gap in the Minister’s summing-up letter which relates to enforcement. Students union premises are included in the premises on which a university must afford freedom of speech, but in practice some university authorities claim that union-organised activities taking place on university premises are not covered and the authorities back off, claiming the union is autonomous. Nor do they put a stop to safe-space controls. Or the universities tell students who have been discriminated against by their union that complaints are handled exclusively by the students union, which is wrong in law.

The Universities UK 2016 task force on violence against women, harassment and hate crime set out guidance for a disciplinary code for universities to adopt. The task force found that the evidence also suggested,

“that despite some positive activity, university responses are not as comprehensive, systematic and joined up as they could be. A commitment to addressing these issues is required within every university, from senior leadership down”.

Yet the report’s guidance does not seem to have been widely accepted. Some colleges—for example, SOAS—reject the new definition of anti-Semitism helpfully disseminated by the Government. I say “helpfully” because it distinguishes between lawful, political criticism of a state, which is fine, and race hatred which is not.

I turn now to the other points made in the letter sent to all Peers by the Government. It is stated in that letter that legal proceedings should be brought against universities if the freedom of speech duty is not complied with. That is too slow and the action needs to be against the disruptors in the first place rather than the university. There have been complaints to the Charity Commission about some unions but that, too, is slow and difficult. I respectfully suggest that the basis on which the Government now state that they are confident that students unions are sufficiently controlled by existing law is because I provided them with advice from a QC. Most universities do not know the law and dispute the conclusions. The Office for Students could require freedom-of-speech principles to be included in the public interest governance conditions but there is no requirement at the moment. It ought to be included in the Bill.

As we heard a few moments ago, many of our future leaders, both British and international, are being educated here in our university system. Since the referendum last year, there has been a spotlight on hate incidents, a rising number of unacceptable actions and speech. We are all disgusted by it. Some of us know that this has gone on for years and we are relieved that, finally, the occurrence of hate and intolerance in higher education, the media and society generally is getting the attention and disapprobation necessary. We will be letting down our future leaders if we allow them to receive their education on campuses where censorship is accepted and where hate speech and actions are overlooked. We will be storing up even more trouble for the future.

Accepting my amendment would not only show genuine commitment to excellence and academic freedom but clarify and control the Prevent guidance. It would provide for enforcement and support the UUK task force on hate and harassment. It would help students who have suffered from silencing and worse. To reject the amendment will send yet another message round the world—I am not exaggerating—that the Government and the university system remain passive in the face of a great threat to the future of our young. Our students must not graduate in the belief that there is no real freedom of speech, or that hate is mainstreamed. They must not leave university believing that it is routine to settle debates by silence or violence. For their good, I seek to have this amendment accepted. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment and spoke to it in previous stages of the Bill. I will be brief; in any event, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, set out a comprehensive argument as to why this is so important. Who would have thought that it was important in this country to champion freedom of speech? Sadly, obviously that has become necessary. We are living in strange times. We have heard tales of students closing down free speech, and universities have taken remarkably little action over some issues when freedom of speech should have been protected.

It is difficult. There are obviously grey areas between what is lawful and what is not. As the noble Baroness said, we must not in any way encourage hate speech or incitement to violence but university students should be subject to ideas they find uncomfortable and be in a safe place where they can address them without those ideas immediately being shut down. This amendment also includes students unions, so it should help activities and events organised by students to make quite sure that they too encourage freedom of speech. It is a precious and valued part of our national life, and it is currently under threat. This amendment would add powers to ensure that we preserve it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this is a very important debate. We are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for raising again with such powerful arguments the point she has been making consistently throughout Second Reading and Committee about the need to focus on this and get it right in the legislation. This issue is at the heart of what we really think about universities and higher education providers more generally. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, it is almost shocking to think that the understanding we have of what constitutes a university does not read across to what actually happens on the ground. The stories are legion and very unpleasant, and in many cases almost too awful to talk about in these circumstances.