Higher Education and Research Bill

David Evennett Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marsden]

Lord Mandelson and I are at one on that; I welcome a range of universities, but I want to make sure—I am sure most Members would agree—that they do what they say on the tin and can be trusted in the first place. That is the whole point of what we are saying. [Interruption.] I know, from a previous incarnation, that the Whips are trained to say things like that, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

[The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Mr David Evennett)]

Wait and see.

[Mr Marsden]

I will indeed wait and see.

The Government should take into consideration proposals in the new report that has been prepared for the all-party parliamentary group for adult education, “Too important to be left to chance”. They should study the Fabian Society’s new proposals: it recommends gradually doing away with loans via national insurance and education learning accounts. The Open University, City and Guilds, the TUC, the Institute For Public Policy Research, Unionlearn and several other organisations have produced ideas to facilitate both credit transfer and personal careers accounts, and I have added my own thoughts. They build on the magisterial 2009 NIACE report “Learning Through Life”, co-authored by Tom Schuller and the late lamented Professor David Watson.

Knowledge is power, as shop stewards and industrial injury lawyers know only too well. Today we have an opportunity, but also a duty, to extend that power through learning to millions of workers across Britain. Lifelong learning should not be “siloed”. It contributes to social cohesion, so it is an issue for the Department for Communities and Local Government; it helps people to live longer, so it is an issue for the Department of Health; it helps to return offenders to society, so it is an issue for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice; and it contributes to preparing economically inactive people to enter the world of work, if that is appropriate. I have laboured those points because I realise that, given the smaller budgets that the Education Ministers may have, they may have to go to some of the other Departments with the begging bowl if we are to see any progress in this regard.

Knowledge is not merely power, but the key to empowerment. We should be bold in the world of lifelong learning that we offer our citizens for 2020: we should offer practical skills along with pure knowledge. Instead, however, the Government have been content to make welcome but incremental changes, while the capacity of adult learning is unravelling further. As was pointed out earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), the Bill contains little reference to the part that devo-max can play in expanding new providers, or to the productivity and job needs of the 21st century. That fear is echoed in the alternative White Paper, which states:

“'A private, for-profit university would have neither an interest in meeting a broader public remit nor the interests of the local economy in which it is located—its primary responsibility will be to its owners, investors and shareholders.”

Instead of looking at urgently needed and constructive ways of reducing the financial fees burden on our students, the Government have produced mechanisms which dodge Parliament’s ability to judge and regulate them. Instead of strengthening and shoring up our universities and higher and further education at a most critical time, they risk seriously undermining them by obsessively pursuing a market ideology. Instead of presenting analysis in the wake of Brexit, offering relief, assurances and strategies to safeguard both research excellence in our traditional and modern universities and the involvement of higher education in the local communities and economies that they serve, the Government have presented no answers to the urgent threats, such as brain drains, that are emerging post-23 June. Instead of strengthening our UK HE brand in the uncertain world in which we must negotiate post- Brexit, they have produced what many regard as a hotchpotch of structures in research and science, with unresolved tensions between new structures for England and the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They have continually ducked the suggestions made to them about pre-legislative scrutiny to try to iron out some of these issues, although, thank goodness, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool has initiated an inquiry.

Given the result of the Brexit referendum and the collapse of the Cameron Government, we see how wise it would have been for the Government to reflect and take time. Instead, they are going hell for leather with a Bill that is obsessed with a toxic combination of market and competition-driven ideology. The small measures of progress and relief that they have offered in respect of social mobility could have provided an opportunity for them to paint a bold new picture of a system that would encourage social cohesion, but instead they have undermined their own social mobility agenda in the ways that I have described.

We could have had a Bill which addressed those issues, and which would have commanded wide support across the House and among the institutions that that supply HE and research, but instead, after a week in which the very structures of the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have been turned upside down, we are pressing on as if nothing had happened. Maynard Keynes famously said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

This is not the Bill that this Parliament needs. It is not the Bill that universities and HE institutions needed. It is not the Bill that our country needs—that our countries need. It is a Bill that is currently not fit for purpose. Especially post-Brexit, we need a Bill that will provide direction and structure, and tackle and settle the needs of a crucial part of our national life for the next generation. That is why we cannot support this Bill’s Second Reading tonight.