Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her constructive engagement on this Bill and for briefing Members at an early stage, along with the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, and the right honourable Member for Harlow. I also thank the Bill team. Labour supports the Bill’s aim; we support the idea that people can access funding to undertake the learning they need throughout their career. With people undertaking portfolio careers and with continual changes in technology and society, it is no longer the case that what you learn through a traditional three-year degree course is all that you will need in your work for the next 45 years or so.

We had a number of interesting, if concise, debates as the Bill passed its various stages. The Bill is quite limited in scope and Labour still believes that there could have been scope for setting out a more formal review process on a number of its aspects. This would, not least, have helped to safeguard against unintended consequences, whether around distance and flexible learning or employers making a proper contribution to staff development.

There are a number of potential negative impacts on people who are less able to move to study or who are less able to study full-time because of caring responsibilities. From what the noble Baroness said, we hope and believe that the Government intend to monitor and review the lifelong loan entitlement as it is established and rolled out, to make sure that its promise and potential are fulfilled, and especially to ensure that every person in England can have their own promise and potential fulfilled.

I thank the team in the Labour group office, particularly Clare Scally, as well as my Front-Bench colleagues and mentors—my noble friends Lady Wilcox and Lady Thornton. Their patience and kindness in imparting their own lifelong learning and talking me, a relatively new member of the Labour Front-Bench team, through the process of the passage of the Bill has been hugely appreciated.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise profusely to the House for arriving after the Minister started speaking; business moved much more quickly than I expected.

From these Benches, I thank the Minister and the Bill team very much for all their work on the Bill. We remain concerned about how many adults will wish to take on debt in order to improve their learning, and we look forward to hearing updates from the Minister about how many people have done so. From these Benches, we feel that grants would be a much more effective way of persuading adults to learn. But, of course, we are all totally in favour of lifelong learning, and we wish the Bill well.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, as many of you will know, the number 1 recommendation of the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was for this sort of reform. As someone who was a member of that review and who has spent a considerable part of the last three and a half years on secondment to government to work on the Augar review proposals, among other things, I take this opportunity to thank everyone involved.

I have been jinxed: I have not managed to contribute to any of the fine and informative debates that have taken place on this. They have highlighted some of the challenges that lie ahead. I am enormously encouraged by the cross-party support for the principle of a funding system that genuinely takes us forward into not just the 21st century but a future where post-compulsory lifelong learning is the rule, not the exception. We now have an opportunity to build on this.

I thank everyone involved in the drafting and passing of the Bill—although we have not quite passed it yet. I particularly put on record my appreciation of the work put in by a large number of officials who have worked enormously hard on this—on teasing out the policy implications and on minimising the amount that had to be put into primary legislation. I thank them and the Minister for her support. It is a little miraculous that we have moved from a major recommendation in 2019 to putting this reform on its way to implementation in 2023. So, on behalf of the Augar review team—and, I think, all the future students of this country—I thank everyone involved in this reform.