Higher Education (Fee Limits and Fee Limit Condition) (England) Regulations 2018

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the regulations so lucidly. He referred to the review that is taking place on student finance, which is of huge importance, of course, to students and their families and to universities. He said that the report would come in early 2019 but he said nothing more about it. I have three specific questions about the review. First, will it be publishing either an interim report or any interim statements or summaries of evidence taken? I think that could be quite useful in stimulating the public debate that needs to take place around the future of the higher education funding system.

The second point is about consultation. Which groups of students and young people are the Government consulting, because a big and controversial issue has been the failure to include young people in the review team? The one group that is not a part of the review team directly is the group of very young people and students who are directly affected by this. That is a big mistake. The right thing to do, particularly if we are to win support from the generation that is paying these fees in a reformed system, is to have some buy-in from them at the beginning. The failure to put those arrangements in place will cost the Government dear. It would be good to know what consultation is taking place with young people.

Thirdly, what polling among the public and young people is the review doing to ascertain the attitudes of the public at large to the sharing of the burdens of paying for higher education and the attitudes among young people? My view all along, having played a part in the introduction of the original scheme in 2004 but having been opposed to the trebling of tuition fees in 2010, has been that students recognise that in order to be responsible and constructive members of society, particularly in the current climate, where they are very focused on getting jobs and making their way in the world, they need to make some contribution to the higher education system, but they resent the fact that all the costs of the higher education system have been moved to the students and the graduates. Polling might bring that out and might help to establish a basis of agreement on public attitudes, which might make a burden-sharing approach possible which, to be blunt, might mean cutting the level of fees from £9,500 but not eliminating them entirely.

My party’s official position is now to eliminate fees entirely. The noble Viscount’s position is to have them at £9,500. There is quite a big space between zero and £9,500. Being, as ever, moderate and constructive, I am quite keen that we come in somewhere in the middle of that space. That might be sustainable among the public, rather than doing what I fear may happen, which is lurching from a very high level of fees by international standards to no fees at all.

Finally, when I read the debate in the House of Commons Delegated Legislation Committee on these regulations, the Minister for Higher Education said that he was conducting a listening tour around the country. I am strongly in favour of listening tours; I wish the Government would conduct them on many other issues, too, including Brexit, but that is for a later debate. However, he gives an extraordinary figure for the number of students he has met, which I am hugely impressed by. He said that on his listening tour so far he has met more than 1,500 students. I am not sure whether those 1,500 have been in the hall with him as he has been going around or whether he has personally conducted conversations with them.

I would be very grateful if the noble Viscount could tell us whether he has any findings from the Minister’s listening tour or whether the Minister might publish findings from his tour when he has finished it, because knowing that he has conducted a listening tour but not knowing what he has heard is not of great use to Parliament when we come to consider these significant student finance and funding issues after the review reports in the early part of next year.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, building on the reviews by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, can the Minister say what progress the Government have made in appointing the independent reviewer of the teaching excellence framework? I can only apologise if I have missed the announcement somewhere along the line.

What assurances can the Government give that the independent reviewer of the teaching excellence framework will be a genuine exercise that influences the future design of the scheme? We would oppose any attempts to link tuition fee rises to the quality of teaching as determined by the TEF, which we maintain has flawed metrics, several of which have nothing to do with teaching.

Have the Government considered replacing fees with a graduate tax? This statutory instrument makes no attempt to find a solution to the position set out in the recent Economic Affairs Committee report, which estimates that in 30 years’ time the Government will have to find:

“an extra £8.4 billion to cover expected losses on the 2017/18 student loans”.

Does the Minister have any comment on the immense debt with which the current scheme is burdening future generations?

We are pleased to see in these regulations that the Erasmus year continues to be mentioned. Can the Minister give us any further assurance on government plans to ensure that we continue to be part of Erasmus, whether or not we leave the EU? It is a programme that brings great benefits to participants and to the economy, as students return with a more significant skill set to offer to employers. Does the Minister have any certainty to offer us on Erasmus?

We continue to be concerned about the changes to nursing funding, and would strongly support reinstating student bursaries. It is good to read here about the exemptions on equivalent and lower qualifications for health professionals. Might that lead to a wider exemption for ELQs in other areas? As we know, loss of ELQ funding is one of the key factors in the disastrous decline in adult education, and we would welcome some good news on that front.

Will the Government carefully monitor the effect on nurse recruitment and retention of the recent changes to funding? We note that the number of applicants to undergraduate nursing courses in the year after the abolition of bursaries was announced fell by 11,750—a reduction of 18%. This compounds the existing shortage of nurses in the UK. Almost every hospital is dangerously short of nurses, and the Royal College of Nursing estimates that there are 40,000 nursing vacancies across the health and social care sectors. That shortage will only worsen if nurses cannot be easily recruited from the EU. I hope the Minister can offer some reassurances on those various aspects.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, may I add something from a university perspective? I declare an interest as chair of the council of Lancaster University. I welcome the fact that the £9,250 maximum fee is being extended for another year—although of course that has denied to universities for the past two years the inflation increase that they were promised.

The review is necessary given the political climate surrounding fees, and the Government have to take into account the risky financial situation now facing the university sector. Any significant cut in fees would have a big impact on the excellence of our universities, unless it were wholly made up for by an increase in teaching grant. I ask the noble Viscount whether he is in any position to offer the sector any assurance that any cut in fees would be made up for by an increase in teaching grant. If it is not, there will be consequences, particularly for universities like mine, which has ambitious plans for expansion, and also, for a leading academic institution, has one of the best rates of state school pupils and people from deprived backgrounds in the country. We are good on equity as well as excellence, and the possibility is a real cloud over our financial prospects for the future.

One of the issues the Government have to address is that if there is a significant cut in fees following the review and there is no increase in teaching grant, one of the areas that universities are bound to look at is the money set aside for widening participation. At the moment we give a lot of bursaries to poor students. I have met many students at Lancaster who say that the reason why they came there was that we could offer them a £1,000 bursary. With the withdrawal of the means-tested maintenance grant, this has become very significant. I hope that the Government are considering bringing back a means-tested maintenance grant, but the real point I want to make is that these regulations give universities financial certainty for only an additional year. The future prospect is very clouded. Universities need more certainty if they are to be one of the starring sectors of the British economy, as they have been for the last 20 years.