Higher Education and Research Bill

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is being selective. I can easily point to the 8% increase in visas from Chinese nationals in 2016. Overall, if we look at the numbers since 2011, visa applications are up by 10%, but let us not get distracted further. I will take a further intervention and then I shall move on.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has been a great advocate on this issue for a long time. I personally thank him for delivering these amendments. Given that there will be a new duty on institutions to give out their numbers of international students, what will happen to institutions that, for any reason, do not give that information to HESA under the terms of the enforcement powers?

[Joseph Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. We would expect all higher education providers on the OFS register to be compliant with the duties and conditions imposed on them. If they are not, the OFS has a range of regulatory tools at its disposal to deal with such eventualities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gordon Marsden]

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend makes a further point about the Government’s still having a long way to go in understanding and realising what that international sector is all about. That is why it is so disappointing that the Minister will not go further—in fact, the truth is that he cannot go further. He and his colleagues have been sat on from a great height by No. 10 and by the Home Office. That is the reality. The Tory party and its members are split down the middle on this issue. It is an unedifying shambles that the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), who is retiring, presciently commented on in The Times today. It is a shambles that Labour, in government, would have no part in.

During this election campaign, we will continue to press for the removal of students from net migration statistics for public policy purposes, and although I genuinely welcome the new designated body that the Minister has talked about, the truth is exactly as the hon. Member for Bedford said: it leaves the Minister without a visible means of support in delivering the objective that he will no doubt fervently wish could be delivered under that process.

The problems and weaknesses of the Bill have been substantial, not least as regards the wilful obtuseness of the Government to do anything to make a pre-Brexit Bill—conceived when the Minister and the Government at the time assumed that Brexit would fall—fit for a post-Brexit world. They could have put it out to pre-legislative scrutiny, but they did not. They could have paused it. That was quite rightly argued for by the University and College Union, the Council for the Defence of British Universities and others, including distinguished figures across the sector and in this House, not least the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright)—but they did not.

It has been left to us—by us, I mean not just the Labour party, but the other opposition parties in this House and in the House of Lords—to make the arguments in this place. A concerted effort has been made by cross-Benchers, Lib Dem peers, the noble Lord Hannay and the small but important group of Conservative peers, including Lord Patten, who have wrinkled their noses at, and fought ferociously against, the technocratic complexities and central dictation in the Bill. Those things risk blunting the creativity and dynamism of our HE sector, whether delivered at an old university such as Oxford or Cambridge, at the many dynamic new universities which MillionPlus celebrated at its 25th anniversary last night, or in the further education sector. I pay tribute to the Government for extending HE awarding powers to the FE sector, not least because my college, Blackpool Fylde College, will be one of the first to benefit.

The Americans have a saying that goes something like, “When you get lemons, you have to try to make lemonade,” and that is what we have all tried to do. We have tried to make a flawed Bill better fit for purpose, and to help, not hinder, the dynamism that I have talked about. We have had a decent thrash at it; without that decent thrash and the work of the House of Lords, I think it would have been a very poor Bill indeed.

[Ben Howlett]

You will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that my remarks in this debate will be short. I think all hon. Members have something else to do right now.

I have championed universities for the last six years, and I have debated with many different Members from across the House. In the last two years, it has been a great privilege to be vice-chair of the all-party group on students, together with my friend the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). I wish him every success, and I hope to be able to join him in continuing to represent students in Parliament after 8 June. I have 23,000 students in my constituency, spread across two universities: Bath Spa University and the University of Bath. Both universities have a large complement of international students, who are absolutely vital. We have had debates in this place for years about how much they contribute to our local and national economies.

I am pleased that the Bill has been introduced. The student community and the higher education sector as a whole have called for such legislation since 2011, when Lord Willetts introduced new law in this area, and I hope that this Bill will receive Royal Assent later today. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister for all his work on the Bill. He has been a great champion of the higher education sector and international students, and the Bill is testament to all his work.

I turn quickly to Lords amendment 156 and Government amendments (a), (b) and (c) in lieu. As has been said, it is incredibly welcome that the Minister and the Department for Education have listened to a campaign group of MPs and placed on the Higher Education Statistics Agency, or the designated body, a duty to report on the number of international students. That makes a massive difference, and it represents a significant change in the Government’s tone. I thank the Minister for listening to us and delivering that amendment.

I want to give a bit of a shout-out to Members who have made a big contribution to the campaign, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Twickenham (Dr Mathias), for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell), for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond), for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) and for Bedford (Richard Fuller), and my right hon. Friends the Members for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) and for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry). They are great champions for their student communities and for international students. I pay tribute to Opposition colleagues who have also championed that case.

I am delighted that the Department for Education has produced the amendment. If the outcome of the election on 8 June is favourable, I guarantee not only to the Government but to my constituents that I will continue—in collaboration with Universities UK, the Russell Group and MillionPlus—to make the case for taking international students out of the overall immigration figures. It is very peculiar that they are still included. If I am around after 8 June, as I hope to be, I will make such representations along with colleagues. I hope that they will all be re-elected, too, so that we can make this final carve-out in the interests of my constituents, students, international students and the UK’s reputation overseas. I wish everybody a huge amount of luck in the forthcoming general election.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

We will certainly talk to businesses in the Doncaster region, as well as to those elsewhere in Yorkshire, but I am delighted to say that only 1.3% of businesses will actually pay the apprenticeship levy. For all other businesses, particularly small businesses, the Government will fund 90% of training costs following the introduction of the levy proper next month.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

Last week’s announcement on business rates by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor will provide welcome relief to hundreds of independent small businesses in my constituency. Will the Minister join me in congratulating our tourist management organisation, Visit Bath, as it focuses more attention on the marketing of our independent small businesses in Bath in domestic and international markets, which will bring jobs and growth to my constituency?

[Margot James]

I absolutely join my hon. Friend in congratulating Visit Bath on all the trade and ideas that it brings to SMEs in his constituency.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Access to finance is key to a dynamic life sciences sector in the UK. In November, the Prime Minister announced a review of patient capital to identify barriers to access to long-term finance for growing firms, looking at all aspects of the financial system. We look forward to the review’s recommendations ahead of the autumn statement.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

The industrial strategy will have a major impact on speeding up Genomics England’s ability to sequence the genome. Will my hon. Friend confirm that he is working with the Department of Health to ensure that the Government’s investment will be spent effectively to encourage greater productivity?

Exiting the EU: Science and Research

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

These are important questions, which, my hon. Friend will understand, will form a significant part of the overall discussions around our future relations with the EU. We recognise the benefits of collaboration with European partners, and we will seek to ensure that we can continue to derive strong collaboration arrangements all around the world.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has been a strong advocate for our university sector since he took up his post. One of the key concerns of my university, and of others across the country—he probably knows what I am about to say—is in relation to international student numbers. Given the opportunities available to us in a post-Brexit world, we have to be better at communicating what immigration looks like in our country. For me, and probably for most universities across the country, it is important that we split up our international student numbers from our overall immigration figures. That has the support of 70% of the public. I hope that my hon. Friend will agree on that point.

[Joseph Johnson]

Whenever I get the chance, I reiterate that we welcome international students and value the contribution that they make to our universities and our economy. I am pleased to be able to repeat that there is no cap on the number of international students who can come and study here, and there is no plan to introduce one.

It is important that we make it clear that EU students continue to be able to access our loan book and come here to study on home fee status, just as domestic UK students do. The Government have been very quick to make that clear to students applying in 2016-17 and to those who will be applying in 2017-18. We will decide the policy for the 2018-19 academic year in plenty of time for the start of that application process.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Committee Debate: 11th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Joseph Johnson]

The analogy is perfectly reasonable: a regulator is charging a registration fee to the beneficiaries of its regulation. The end users of the service or product are ultimately indirectly contributing towards the cost of the benefits of running the regulator.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

I agree with my hon. Friend; now is not the time to be talking about the proportions between who is paying what, when and how. However, will he confirm that, in the consultation, the proportions between what the state will be paying and what the providers will be paying will be decided at that stage?

[Joseph Johnson]

Yes, that is exactly right and I have already given some examples of some of the areas in which the Government will want to be making a contribution towards the overall costs of the regulatory framework.

I assure hon. Members that the power under clause 66 is about enabling the Government to express their funding priorities. This recognises that in a world where we set maximum fees, Government need to ensure that they can direct money to some high-cost courses to ensure it remains viable for providers to teach them. Amendment 240 would prevent this. It would also have a further particularly unwelcome, and I am sure unintended, effect in that it would remove the Secretary of State’s ability to make teaching grant to the OFS and replace it with an ability to make grant only for the OFS’s set-up and running costs. That would remove the OFS’s ability to fund activity such as high-cost science, technology, engineering and maths courses or widening participation.

Amendment 240 would undermine the sustainability of our HE funding system, to the detriment of students. Further, we are taking the opportunity in this legislation to refresh the protections for academic freedom so that they are appropriate for today’s circumstances. I ask the hon. Member for City of Durham to withdraw the amendment.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Tenth sitting)

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right. In fact, the changes in the coalition Government’s proposals that he cites were used by some in the Government to celebrate the progressive nature of those proposals—we would not wholly agree with that. We need to understand, though, the difference between the impact of funding changes on school students, who may well have been—and certainly seem to be—willing to take on debt, compared with those who are in mid-career or later in life.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

We have been doing some work on this in the Women and Equalities Committee. One thing that is clear is the lack of data. Many hypothetical scenarios have been analysed, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is an opportunity here to get to the nitty-gritty of the argument and find out the data behind the reasons why participation levels are falling among part-time students, particularly for older workers? In some instances, it might be the fact that there are other options available to them, such as apprenticeships and all the other Government schemes. In other instances it might be the provision of finance. We need an assurance from the Minister about what proposals he has to create more data, to analyse the subject more.

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and, indeed, for the work we do together on the all-party parliamentary group on students. That is a fair point. I was concentrating on some of the funding factors. For older students, the fact that they have mortgages and families, or that they are at albeit modest salary levels that trigger immediate repayment, are apparent disincentives. Matching the introduction of the new funding regime and the cliff-edge drop in the numbers of part-time students would suggest that there is a relationship. He is absolutely right that we should be looking at all the data and doing research properly to understand what is happening. I agree with him, and that is at the heart of my amendment: the OFS should have the responsibility to think deeply about part-time participation and draw up recommendations to address that.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Ninth sitting)

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Committee Debate: 9th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is keen on quoting certain people, so let me quote someone who is an expert on quality assurance and see what he thinks. The chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, who I consider to be an expert in the area, has said:

“The government has struck a balance between encouraging competition and rigorous protection of UK higher education’s world-class reputation”.

There is clear evidence that the Bill produces high-quality, rigorous quality assurance. What I hear from the hon. Gentleman is completely contrary to what the experts say. Listen to the experts.

[Gordon Marsden]

The hon. Gentleman no doubt considers himself a bit of an expert, given his co-vice-chairmanship of the all-party group on students, which my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central chairs. I hear what the gentleman from the QAA said. Of course, the QAA, as well as the Higher Education Funding Council for England and various other organisations, will be under the sword of Damocles over the next two to three years as the Bill goes through, so perhaps it is not surprising that there might be some circumspection about commenting on the situation. The fact of the matter is that no one knows. No one knows because the detailed basis on which the TEF will eventually be implemented is still not there. I will come on later to why the Government seem to be missing several tricks in not moving further down that road at the moment, but that is the case right now.

What we know is that the evidence is piling up about year-on-year tuition fee increases that are not based on merit. There might be arguments for increasing tuition fees, but the Government are setting out an automatic mechanism for a two-year period that will significantly and substantially increase fees with no impact assessments and no reference to the quality of the university degrees that are being graded, in a rather trivial PR fashion, as gold, silver and bronze. That is the reality, and the Minister cannot escape from it.

On some of the tuition fee issues and on how the Bill would set in stone that the fee increases will be linked to the TEF, allowing all the work to be done in the OFS away from the daily scrutiny of Parliament, documents such as “Does Cost Matter?”, produced by the National Education Opportunities Network, found that if fees increased, young people who were eligible for free school meals would be the most likely to reconsider going to university, followed by non-white young people.

We have a lot of evidence and a lot of suggestions that that sort of process will have a double-whammy effect. First, it will do nothing for the reputation of the universities in those two years. They will not be able to demonstrate their reputation over and above that which is already there because the metrics for the TEF in the two years are so crude. What it will do is empower them to increase their fees, and we know how various universities chose to interpret what the Minister did in the summer by increasing fees for current students, as well as for future students. That will be a serious and difficult issue.

I am sorry to tell the Chief Whip that I cannot name the next person I wish to quote because he wishes to write anonymously—[Laughter.] That is because he is a young academic who is too financially insecure to risk rocking the boat over the TEF structure. Not the Chief Whip—I promoted him—but the Government Whip will perhaps store his guffaws and allow me to quote from a piece about the TEF in The Guardian on 23 September.

“There was—at least in my mind—huge potential for the Tef to recognise the valuable job that teaching-intensive universities do, and encourage sound pedagogical practice… Rather than doing any of these things, the Tef will be based on three crude metrics: student retention and progression; the number of students in paid employment after graduation; and scores on selected items of the National Student Survey… Methodologically, the Tef is flawed. For instance, students’ assessments of individual teachers show persistent gender bias, and the item on assessment and feedback hardly ever changes, whatever the context. It’s also flawed conceptually: ‘satisfaction’ is not the same as ‘learning’, as any psychology text will tell you.”

That was something the hon. Member for Cannock Chase’s colleague amusingly commented on earlier. The writer continues:

“The Tef isn’t concerned with the art and practice of teaching. It does not set out to capture and promote those practices… I don’t believe that universities have to resign themselves to the Tef structure… But I can’t speak out: as a young academic, I’m far too financially insecure to risk rocking the boat.”

Let me quote somebody who is prepared and able to put her head above the parapet: a senior professor of psychology at Oxford, Dorothy Bishop.

“The report shows that while the costs of TEF to the higher education sector…are estimated at £20 million, the direct benefits will come to £1,146 million, giving a net benefit of £1,126 million.”

She shows clearly that crucial data from statistical modelling show that the

“TEF generates money for institutions that get a good rating because it allows them to increase tuition fees in line with inflation. Institutions that don’t participate in the TEF or those that fail to get a good enough rating will not be able to exceed the current £9,000 a year fee, and so in real terms their income will decline over time.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

I have long admired the quality enhancement approach of the Scottish higher education system and think the Scottish higher education sector has often led the way on student engagement in the quality enhancement process. The committee for QAA Scotland includes the head of Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland, the organisation that brings the sector together with student representatives to look at quality enhancement, and it does address the concern.

I have heard in some quarters—this comes to the point the hon. Member for Bath was trying to make in the Chamber yesterday—the argument that if there are students on the board of an institution, that somehow diminishes the need to engage students elsewhere within the institution. In the Quality Assurance Agency, there are two student representatives on the board, there are students represented elsewhere on committees in it, there is a whole committee dedicated to student engagement, and there are students involved in quality assessment as part of institutional review teams—not just in Scotland but in England as well, following the Scottish lead. That is a great model because the QAA has recognised, both in principle and through the benefit of experience, that involving students in a meaningful way in the quality assurance process has benefits for everyone. The student voice has to be involved and engaged. It is critical for helping to measure quality and making sure students get what they are promised.

[Ben Howlett]

If the hon. Gentleman had not tweeted earlier the fact he was going to ask this question, I would have had to come up with this on the spot. His point regarding the QAA is interesting. I agree that there should be student engagement throughout the entire system, but the point the QAA was making in oral evidence and in writing was that we should not have student representation on boards, even though it does at the moment, but that we should making sure we engage with students throughout the entire process. If we think about what it is saying, this is not working, so we have to look at a much more holistic approach to student engagement throughout the system.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Eighth sitting)

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Committee Debate: 8th Sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Wes Streeting]

It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I hope we will have the opportunity to hear more about your mind-expanding experiences at university. That was highly enlightening.

Britain has one of the best higher education systems in the world, educating millions of students from this country and around the world. Behind that success are hundreds of thousands of dedicated staff, ranging from university leaders and those who educate students on a daily basis to the many staff who perform essential support functions, from processing admissions to keeping our campuses clean.

Like any good employer, universities should invest in their staff and ensure that they are paid fairly. My motivation for tabling these amendments is to tackle two things. One is excessive high pay at the top of our universities, and the other is some of the remaining poverty rates that continue to be paid to staff working in and around higher education, particularly those working for university contractors.

I will begin with high pay. It is important to say that as leaders of universities, vice-chancellors carry serious responsibilities for a large number of staff, manage huge budgets and have to consider a wide range of activities, from research and innovation to educating students. It is right that we pay vice-chancellors at a rate that enables us to recruit and retain the very best leadership from this country and around the world. I certainly do not begrudge vice-chancellors appropriate payment for the work they do or, indeed, use the ludicrous benchmark that appears from time to time of comparing vice-chancellors’ salaries with the Prime Minister’s.

I have been concerned, however, about excessive rates of pay rises in recent years, particularly at a time of restraint in public spending and with students paying more than ever for their higher education. I do not use terms such as fat cat lightly, but vice-chancellors who have decent and appropriate salaries have been receiving fat-cat pay rises with little justification and certainly inappropriate scrutiny from institutional remuneration bodies.

I know that the Minister is concerned about that. In the HEFCE grant letter for this year, the Minister and the former Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), included a specific reference to excessive high pay at the top and urged universities to show greater restraint— incidentally, not only in terms of pay and pay rises, but in awards made to vice-chancellors on exit. I hope that the Minister will see the amendments as friendly ones that would help to pursue the issue that he and the former Secretary of State raised in the grant letter and could really make a difference.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good case for open and transparent processes in relation to vice-chancellors’ pay. I have a lot of sympathy with him about that. However, is he aware that this Government have already introduced gender pay gap reporting? For the institutions he mentions, the amendment would simply mean a duplication of legislation. We should look at enhancing the current legislation.

[Wes Streeting]

The hon. Gentleman is right to refer to the gender pay gap in higher education. There is something like an £8,000 difference in the pay awarded to male and female academic staff. My amendments do not deal specifically with the gender pay gap, but instead address the inequality between pay at the top and at the bottom.

The amendments would address those issues in two ways. The first is to require universities to publish the pay ratio between the highest-paid staff and the lowest-paid staff and the median rate of pay. That would get remuneration committees to think hard, when telling front-line staff that they cannot afford pay rises, about whether they are applying the same principle to staff at the top. According to the Times higher education survey, one in 10 universities paid their leaders 10% more in 2014-15 than the previous year, while average staff pay rose by just 2%. It is incredibly demoralising for university staff, academic staff and support staff when they feel they are exercising pay restraint but see university leaders not leading by example.

Publishing the pay ratio would bring about greater equity and a greater focus on low pay. I do not see any good reason why any university in this country should not be an accredited living wage employer. I hope that one outcome of the amendments would be to reinforce many of the campaigns led by students unions and trade unions to persuade universities to become accredited living wage employers.

As well as proposing publishing information to push for transparency, the amendments would strengthen accountability by including staff and student representatives on remuneration committees. That is important for two reasons. One is that staff representatives, through the University and College Union and other trade unions, and student representatives, through their students unions, bring a degree of independence from the process. They have a legitimate interest in ensuring fair pay from a staff perspective and also from a student perspective, in terms of ensuring that their fees are well spent.

There is also a broader point, which ties into the interesting exchange earlier about the idea of a university being, as well as all the things that the Minister set out in his response to my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, a community. An important part of a university is the academic community in the university. It is not made up just of university leaders and staff; students are also part of it, and I think that it is important to include them in the decision-making process.

I therefore hope that the Minister looks favourably on the amendments. They would reinforce the signal that he has already sent through the HEFCE grant letter. They would help to concentrate more effectively the minds of remuneration committees, as well as bringing about a wider range of perspectives to ensure that they are reaching the right conclusion, to the benefit of students, staff and the taxpayer. I hope that the Minister supports the amendments.

[Joseph Johnson]

I thank the hon. Member for Ilford North for his amendments, to which we are giving some thought. However, I emphasise that the public interest governance condition that the clause contains is a vital component of the new regulatory framework and is designed to ensure that providers are governed appropriately, as he wants them to be. That is in recognition that some providers’ governing documents—in particular, those of providers accessing Government grant funding—are of public interest.

Let me first explain how we envisage the public interest governance condition working. Clause 14 explains what the condition allowed for by clause 13 is. It will be a condition requiring certain providers’ governing documents to be consistent with a set of principles relating to governance. The principles will be those that the OFS thinks will help ensure that the relevant higher education provider has suitable governance arrangements in place. That is not new. Legislation currently requires the governing documents of certain providers—broadly, those that have been in receipt of HEFCE funding—to be subject to Privy Council oversight. That is the backdrop.

Let me deal with the amendments. I do not believe that amendment 25 is necessary, and it could be confusing. The arrangements are already set out and designed for the primary purpose of ensuring that appropriate governance arrangements are in place and that best practice is observed. The introduction of the term “practices” through the amendment would risk changing the scope of the public interest governance condition to give it a much wider and more subjective application and imposing a significant and ambiguous regulatory burden on the OFS. That would stray outside our stated policy objective and beyond the OFS’s regulatory remit.

The suggestion in amendments 26 and 27 is to include principles relating to transparency of remuneration as being helpful for potential inclusion within the consultation process. We resist those also. We do not think that it would be helpful at this stage to make them mandatory components in clause 14. That is because, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, higher education institutions are autonomous institutions and the Government cannot lightly dictate what autonomous institutions pay their staff. As the hon. Gentleman said, we have already as a Government recently expressed concern about what appears to be an upward drift in senior salaries. The previous Secretary of State in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and I put this explicitly, as the hon. Gentleman said, in our most recent HEFCE grant letter. We clearly stated that we want to see sector leaders show greater restraint. The hon. Gentleman will also know, as a seasoned veteran of the HE sector, that higher education institutions are now obliged to publish the salaries of their vice-chancellors anyway, but as I said, we are watching this issue very closely and doing everything we can to urge the sector to exercise restraint, without crossing the line and interfering in the practices of autonomous institutions.

[Ben Howlett]

Will my hon. Friend give assurances, however—I agree this should not be put in the Bill—that he will work with the new OFS to ask them to look at remuneration, and also make sure that transparency is at the very heart of the OFS in relation to remuneration?

Higher Education and Research Bill (Seventh sitting)

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th Sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Gordon Marsden]

That is clutching at straws, but I stand by what I said in 2001. If the Minister will permit a mild compliment, I compliment the Government on grasping the nettle of increasing the way in which teaching, as a principle, is judged in relation to research. Many Labour Members have been banging on about that for years.

The Minister wants to go into history. When I was on the Education Committee in the 2000s, we questioned the then Labour Government vigorously about the research assessment exercise changes, and many of us on that Committee made the point that teaching excellence needs to be recognised and funded. There is no argument about us being in support of placing greater emphasis on teaching excellence. The argument is about whether we can save the Government from the consequences of their own folly. If the Government are not careful, they will taint the whole exercise through the cynical way in which they are using this simply as a coupon—I repeat the reference. That is precisely why a number of higher education institutions, including the University of Cambridge, have said that, and it is precisely why a number of Russell Group vice-chancellors—we will come on to this in clause 25—have shown themselves very lukewarm and sceptical about signing up to the TEF in the first place.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

It sounds as though the hon. Gentleman is listening to other evidence than what we heard. He talks about evidence from the vice-chancellors, so let me quote one of the vice-chancellors who has given evidence. Ed Peck of Nottingham Trent University says:

“Linking increases in student fees to performance under the TEF is a further safeguard for students, one that has now been largely accepted by the sector.”

Is the hon. Gentleman calling the vice-chancellor of Nottingham Trent University cynical?

[Gordon Marsden]

No, I am not calling any of the vice-chancellors cynical. Obviously they will welcome any mechanism that will bring forth additional fee funding. The people I am calling cynical—is cynical an appropriate parliamentary expression, Mr Hanson? I mean no disrespect.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ben Howlett Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

1. What steps his Department has taken to engage with British businesses since the EU referendum.

[Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

10. What steps his Department has taken to engage with British businesses since the EU referendum.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Howlett]

I thank the Secretary of State for his answer, and I welcome the whole team to the new Department. The aerospace industry is absolutely vital to the west of England economy not just for jobs, but for growth. Will the Secretary of State work with me to ensure that the entire aerospace industry receives the support it requires and deserves?

[Greg Clark]

I certainly will do that. One of the biggest privileges of this job is to be reunited with aerospace; I got to know the sector when I was Science Minister. In fact, my first ministerial meeting was to have breakfast with the aerospace growth partnership at the Farnborough airshow, where I ran into my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth). The west of England was very well represented there. For example, Katherine Bennett of Airbus, whom I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) knows well, one of the founder board members of the West of England LEP, was there. This is a very important sector for the economy, and it will have my wholehearted support.