Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

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

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

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)

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

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 (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

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

[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?

Education, Skills and Training

Debate between Ben Howlett and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

I will make a bit of progress, if I may.

Universities UK and GuildHE are clear in their support for our intention to link access to the limited inflationary uplift to an assessment of quality, which is a principle we have long accepted for the funding of research in our universities. It was a Conservative Government who brought in the first research assessment exercise in 1986, and there is no doubt that our rigorous system of only funding excellence has driven up the quality of our research over the past three decades. Let us take a look at the statistics. The UK has recently overtaken the US to rank first among comparable nations for our field-weighted citations impact. With just 0.9% of the world’s population and 3.2% of its research and development expenditure, the UK accounts for 16% of the most highly cited articles. Now is the time to extend that principle and link funding to the quality of teaching —as assessed by the teaching excellent framework, not just student numbers—as we have long and successfully done in research.

[Ben Howlett]

There were two very interesting omissions in the speech of the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle). There was not one mention of what students want, which is higher quality teaching. The other huge omission was the fact that if teaching quality decreases, the fees of course decrease as well, which gives all universities a massive carrot to improve the quality of their teaching.

[Joseph Johnson]

My hon. Friend is quite right. We are putting in place the reputational and financial incentives to drive and spread best practice throughout this sector, and the teaching excellence framework will be an important part of our doing so.

The inflationary uplift we are allowing to universities that demonstrate high-quality teaching is a £12 billion investment in the skills base of this country over the next decade. It is now for the Opposition to explain how they would make up for such a significant shortfall in university funding. To do so would either mean cutting resources from our universities, risking the sustainability of our world-class sector and leading to the reintroduction of aspiration-limiting student number controls, or the classic Labour response to any policy challenge—[Interruption]—we are already hearing it articulated: of more spending, more taxes, more borrowing and more debt. Labour Members might well heed the words of Ed Balls, who recently told Times Higher Education that Labour

“clearly didn’t find a sustainable way forward for the financing of higher education”.

He described that failure in the run-up to the last general election as

“a bit of a blot on Labour’s copybook”.

Indeed, it is, and the shame is that they clearly still have not learned the lesson

We are fulfilling our manifesto commitment to ensure the continuing success and stability of our reforms, balancing the interests of taxpayers and students. We have struck the right balance: numbers of disadvantaged students are at record levels; university funding is up; and research funding is protected. This is a one nation Queen’s Speech, from a one nation Government. Through our proposals, we are extending the benefits of a great education to school pupils and students across the country, and we must never let the Labour party put that at risk.