Higher Education Students: Statutory Duty of Care

Debate between George Eustice and Robert Syms

Monday 5th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

Throughout this debate we have heard tragic stories: it is clear that the problem affects many families up and down the country. I am afraid I am going to add the case of Harry Armstrong Evans, whose parents, Alice and Rupert, have been running a campaign in his memory. He came from Launceston in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann). Because my constituency has the only university in Cornwall, the parents also approached me since they felt this was important.

Harry had had an exceptional set of exam results during his time at the University of Exeter, but he went from being a star pupil to having an unexpectedly set of poor results in his final year. He was in anguish and tried to reach out to his course tutor to discuss it, but it was during half term and the course tutor was not around. As a result of that anguish, Harry took his life. The great tragedy is that his parents were not aware that there was a problem. They had no reason to expect that Harry would have unexpectedly bad results in his final year and saw no reason to reach out to him to say, “Don’t worry if it does not go well in the final year”, or to try to broach that conversation with him.

Some colleagues have said this afternoon that suicide is preventable. It is important to recognise that although it is preventable, that does not mean that there is someone else to blame. When people experience a suicide in the family or among friends or work colleagues, there is always a sense that if only they had known that there had been a problem, they would have reached out to somebody to tell them that there was no need to worry or to be concerned.

It is important that we are clear with universities. When we say that there is a case for a statutory duty of care, we are not necessarily saying that they are to blame for everything that might happen. We are all just collectively saying that there are things that we could do differently, that suicide is preventable, and that if we work on getting things right, we can reduce the number of such tragedies, for suicide is always a terrible tragedy.

Following the death of Harry, Alice and Rupert launched their own parliamentary petition to call for something that they have called Harry’s law. This focuses specifically on the issue of requiring universities to at the very least publish the suicide data that they have. It would simply require that where coroners inform universities that there has been a suicide of an enrolled student, that university has to declare it and make that information public. If the Minister is resistant to going all the way to having a statutory duty of care, or if he is advised by departmental lawyers that such a step is unnecessary and does not add much, at the very least could we require universities to publish the suicide data? If they are required to publish that, I think it likely that they would pay much more attention to the work that they do and the pastoral care that they provide to avoid such terrible tragedies.

Alice and Rupert Armstrong Evans have also proposed that if a university is performing particularly badly and has a highly disproportionate number of suicides, they should potentially be placed in special measures or be given the support that they need to make sure that they get in place the right kind of pastoral care. If the Minister is not willing to support a statutory duty of care for universities, I hope he will look at what can be done to improve the transparency of data and require universities to publish that as a first step, and then perhaps a statutory duty of care could be considered at a future date.

[Sir Robert Syms (in the Chair)]

We now have the Front-Bench wind-up speeches.