Higher Education and Research Bill

James Cleverly 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]

Not at the moment, I am sorry.

Now is hardly the time for embarking on three years of creative chaos, meddling with what the Bill calls the “architecture of quality assurance”, where the White Paper cheerfully says on page 61 that HEFCE and OFFA will dissolve, following the creation of the OfS. It is therefore not surprising that many universities have urged a period of stability. The Vice-Chancellor of Coventry University, Stuart Croft, has said that

“to add the demands of that Bill to those of EU exit, at the same time, will be an intolerable burden for universities that, frankly, threatens to rock our very capacity to do everything we do to promote and extend the UK’s reputation globally”.

The Chairman of the BIS Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), has recently made a similar point.

There are more than 125,000 EU students at UK universities. What is to happen to their continued eligibility to study here or access student loans? If we are seen as insular and inward looking, what does that leave us with regarding the 10% increase in domestic and EU students by 2019-20, which the Government promised in the White Paper? The Chair of the BIS Select Committee also echoed these concerns, saying that

“the government has not provided that clarity needed to reassure individuals”.

The White Paper, of course, and this Bill argue that the new challenger institutions will be central for extending that, but at a time when our existing institution brands already risk losing tens of thousands of EU students, this obsession with untried, unnamed and untested providers could undermine rather than reward the sector. We should not think that will affect only England. There are 20,000 non-UK EU students at Scottish universities and 2,700 at Northern Irish universities.

Finally, what is to happen to the future careers of some of our brightest and best students and our future workforce? During the 2013-14 year, there were 15,000 UK students on the EU-funded Erasmus programme. This is not just about economic losses, but about the potential blighting of a whole generation, brought home to me by an email the weekend after the Brexit vote from a young man in Blackpool who, thanks to the EU Erasmus programme, had just completed a year of his university course in Munich. He said:

“I’m deeply concerned about our path forward as a nation.”

The former Chair of the Science and Technology Committee pressed the Minister on Horizon 2020, but the Minister refused to be drawn on future schemes to enable EU citizens to come to work in science. Why? Because he knows that, given her Home Office stance on migration, the new Prime Minister could veto it. Regardless, then, the Government are merrily pressing on with a Bill introducing major changes that could cause further massive disruption. No wonder people are saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The rhetoric of the White Paper is all about the mechanisms for gaining a rapid increase in young graduates, but there is little mention of the importance of adult skilling, and very little in the Bill to power it. There is a complete failure to plot any realistic lifelong learning strategy to tackle our skills gaps. We need to retrain and reskill older workers because there are not enough young ones.

There was much talk about improving social mobility by the previous Government, but little of it has touched on or benefited older and part-time students. The number of part-time students has plummeted by 38% and mature students have dropped by 180,000 since 2010. As the Open University has said:

“Part-time HE is a catalyst for widening participation. It is essential that the new government reaffirms”

their targets. The Secretary of State was quite right to talk about young people from disadvantaged backgrounds improving through part-time education, but that has not been seen for mature students, whose numbers have declined greatly.

The huge challenges are underlined by the latest survey of students by the National Education Opportunity Network, which says that

“over 40% may be choosing different courses and institutions than those they would ideally like to because of cost and restricting the range of institutions they apply to by living at home”.

This Government have talked the talk on widening participation, but they have not walked the walk. It is astonishing that in such a large Bill, they have not put centrally the importance of adult and part-time learning to improving social mobility. Instead, they tucked it away in a couple of paragraphs in the White Paper.

Speaking as someone whose passion for this area was fuelled by nearly 20 years as a course tutor in the Open University, and having cut my teeth as a post-grad with the Workers Education Association, I am proud to endorse, as is this party, an express commitment to part-time HE and adult education in the proposed general duties of the office for students. I have said previously that the worlds of FE, HE and online learning are morphing into each other far quicker than some Whitehall policy makes us realise. If we are not ahead of the curve, the consequences for our economic performance and social cohesion will be severe.

[James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions a number of criticisms of competition in the university sector, but does he not agree with Lord Mandelson, who said in his response to the Government White Paper:

“I welcome this focus on the range of universities…as they are essential for social mobility”?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is essential that we have R and D, and if we look at the comparators between ourselves and other countries that we are competing with we find some areas where we could and should be doing better—so the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

I want to make a point about productivity. The important point about the German economy, which according to the OECD is 28% more productive than ours, is that businesses, companies and professions understand that human resources—people—are the things that really matter. I shall give an example to show how I know that. I once went to a car factory in Lower Saxony, east Germany. It had been built from the ashes of the collapse of the communist regime, and it was producing Porsche cars. I asked the factory manager what the supply chain looked like, and he said, “I can show you”. He showed me the typical things from Bosch and Pirelli and all the rest, but colleges and universities—people—were also part of the supply chain. That is a very important point, because it shows that if we are really going to be productive and drive through the growth we need, we must consider the human resources. In making sure that we do so, this Bill is a huge step in the right direction.

[James Cleverly]

My alma mater, the University of West London, has relentlessly nurtured a relationship with the industries into which its graduates go. It tailors its courses to the needs of those industries and there is a real symbiotic relationship between the industries and the university. Is that a model we should be looking to expand across our higher education sector?

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a very good point and I was going to loop that in with devolution and so forth. My hon. Friend makes a powerful point: it is very important that our universities are connected to businesses and professions. I would make two further points. First, through devolution and making sure universities become dominant the partners of cities and other regions, they will be able to make those links, develop those stakeholding opportunities and contribute to the world of research and development that is so important beyond the university itself.

Secondly, we must recognise that businesses and professions have an interest in investing in universities and we should encourage them to do so both in the traditional way of supplying capital and in the most sensible way, which is supporting students to go to university, stay at university and develop research opportunities. There are steps in this Bill to make that happen, which is why I welcome it.

I like the idea that the office of students will be able to start helping to shape the new universities and create access to the degree subjects we need. That chimes with the knowledge I and everybody else now has that certain skill sectors are woefully undersupplied. We need to develop the university sector to help put that right. It is important that we develop that relationship.

I also welcome the fact that this Bill is saluting the Nurse review, which is an important contribution to the debate. I can see an opportunity for the Education Committee to have yet another hearing on who might be in charge of UK Research and Innovation, and I look forward to that given our recent experience. That structure needs to be user-friendly in the sense that it must engage with the world of research and all those interested in science, because we must remember that getting IP in the right place is important, as is recognising the value of IP and that there are sometimes questions about who owns IP and who is going to benefit from it. We need to set up a system that looks good and is able to deliver that structure.

I also want to talk about the question of destinations. We think about it all the time when we think of schools because increasingly it is destinations from schools that matter, rather than just qualifications and assessments. Destinations should definitely have a place. That is why I am pleased about the teaching framework, as I think it will help us shape the destination issue in a very interesting way.