Exiting the EU: Higher Education

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) for securing this important debate. I know this subject is very close to her heart, given her work as a university lecturer before her election to serve her constituents here in the House. This subject is also very close to my heart. As an NHS scientist before I came to this place, I worked in a field that thrived on collaboration and recognised no boundaries.

Our universities are rightly held in high esteem worldwide. We have 18 of the top 100 universities in the world, including four in the top eight. Globally, Britain represents only 0.9% of the world’s population, but we have 3.2% of global research and development expenditure and 4.1% of the world’s leading researchers, producing more than 15% of pioneering research papers.

It is well known that British science punches above its weight in the international university league tables and does so mainly thanks to EU grants. British science is not awash with funding; in fact, Britain has the lowest per capita spending on research of any G7 country. Sadly, Brexit and the Government’s handling of the referendum outcome have shown their inability to lead and to quash uncertainty over what Brexit will actually mean for the higher education sector. Brexit just adds more uncertainty, and uncertainty breeds insecurity.

There are two aspects of the human and intellectual cost of Brexit for universities. The first is the brain drain and the second is the potential restrictions on overseas research students. The brain drain is nothing new. Many senior figures in British universities remember the lack of support from the Thatcher Government in the 1980s and the exodus of scientists abroad. It is ironic that the four recent British Nobel prize-winners—Duncan Haldane, David Thouless, Michael Kosterlitz and Sir Fraser Stoddart—are all based in the US, having been forced out of Britain during the 1980s brain drain. British research scientists are worried that the Prime Minister’s mantra that “Brexit means Brexit” will lead to a lack of funding and grants for British science, and has the potential to create a modern-day brain drain.

[Dr Huq]

I neglected to say something in my own speech. As a scientist, is my hon. Friend aware of the Science and Technology Committee’s report last week that says that the future of EU researchers and scientists in this country should be guaranteed, because otherwise we would imperil our science research base here?

[Liz McInnes]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and yes I am. I was briefly a member of the Science and Technology Committee and I try to keep on top of the work that it produces. I fully support its call for EU funding to be replaced in some way by this Government, and I hope that we might get a response from the Minister today on that subject.

[Graham Stringer]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the previous Science and Technology Committee report that pointed out that the EU is inimical to UK science? The clinical trials directive has destroyed much research in this country; the EU’s ban on genetically modified food has destroyed much of the chemical-agricultural industry in this country; and the arbitrary sacking of the Commission’s scientific adviser was destructive to science. We have example after example of how the EU has damaged British science.

[Liz McInnes]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am not aware of that report. I do not know when it was published. It certainly does not echo the views that I am expressing in my speech or the views of eminent vice-chancellors and scientists who work in the UK today. Perhaps if he can send me a copy of the report, I will look at it at a later date.

As well as the potential for a modern-day brain drain, we have the very real potential of UK universities becoming less attractive to international research students. Indeed, the vice-chancellors of LSE, King’s College London and Bristol have already voiced their fears for the recruitment of international students and how that will have serious financial and human resource consequences for our universities. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, is a stalwart remainer, but he recognises the result of the referendum and he wants Cambridge to get the best out of Brexit. He says that to achieve that, the Government must provide some basic clarity on what Brexit actually means. He asks for three things from the Government: clarity on the national status of university staff; a recognition of the collaborative ideal implicit in EU projects; and a Government guarantee of vital university budgets. I hope that his requests will be listened to and heeded by the Government.

Some people might regard the vice-chancellor of Cambridge as something of an expert, and although the people of this country were urged not to listen to experts during the referendum, it is vital that, on this subject and the many other areas affected by the Brexit negotiations, the Government take note of our finest minds and our experts. They are not asking for a running commentary, but for clarity and a coherent, informed plan as to the exact nature and manner of our departure from the EU.

The EU makes substantial financial contributions to research in UK universities. Research funding from the EU amounts to some £1 billion a year, while Britain’s national research budget, as I alluded to while discussing British science, is below international averages. The EU’s contribution to the income of UK universities has risen by more than 30% in the past five years. I represent a Greater Manchester constituency, and universities across our region have more than 4,000 EU students currently on their campuses. That equates to spending of £90 million a year—that is not just tuition fees, but expenditure in the local economy. Manchester University has received £48 million in research funding in the past two years alone. The loss of such substantial funding and a failure to attract EU students could not fail to have a detrimental effect on our area.

I have spoken about the economic positives and security of funding, but the academic, scientific and higher education sectors are not merely about money. Education at its core is about collaboration, common understanding and continual progress. Education has no boundaries and no borders, and science knows no country. We must decide where Britain’s place post-Brexit is going to be. I hope that it will be not in isolationism and introversion, but that the Government will set out a clear plan for diversity, collaboration and funding and for our universities to maintain their place and their standing in the world.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I have got five Members on the list to speak by half-past 10, so I ask them to keep their remarks down to just below five minutes. I invite Jim Shannon to give us an example of that.

Living Wage

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for securing this debate and for her exceptional work on this issue since the Government’s national living wage took effect. She has campaigned tirelessly for the rights and wages of workers, to make sure companies do not renege on their contractual commitment to the rate of statutory pay by reviewing and diminishing their staff benefit and reward structures. She has held firms such as B&Q and Marks & Spencer to account. They have tried to offset the cost of the national living wage by cutting Sunday pay, bank holiday pay, company pension contributions and unsocial hours. I echo the words of the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne): that is not

“in the spirit of the law.”

I commend my hon. Friend’s unshakeable belief in following through on this undertaking, persistently raising this issue inside the Chamber and relentlessly campaigning outside the House. I am sure the thousands of affected workers would also like to thank her, too.

Many of those people are in my constituency. This week, I received a letter from a constituent, Lynn, who works for Marks & Spencer and has done so for 34 years. These are her words:

“I feel I have been blackmailed and threatened to sign the form to accept the small pay-out because I was told I would not receive this; also they would change my contract and that would mean I would have to start working Sundays and work all bank holidays. No matter what they say the loyal long service worker has been sold down the river and threatened.”

Lynn clearly feels that she has been forced into an “agreement”, despite the warm words from the Minister, and that she has been blackmailed—those are her words, not mine. It is disappointing to hear reports like this from employees of stalwarts of our high streets, which really should be striving to be seen as exemplar employers. While all this has been going on, Marks & Spencer has reported a 4.3% increase in profits; the total is £689 million in the UK and £1.1 billion internationally this year alone.

As we are all aware, this week is Living Wage Week—the real living wage, as determined by researchers at Loughborough University, not the Government’s misnamed “national living wage”, which is a new national minimum wage, no more, no less. The real living wage is good for the individual, good for the family, good for society and good for business itself. Two thirds of employers who pay the living wage—the real living wage—reported a significant impact on recruitment and retention. They also saw a sharp fall in absenteeism. More than 80% reported improvements in staff performance. It was my privilege yesterday to visit the living wage event held in Parliament and to talk with many small and medium-sized enterprises about the benefits of having living wage status and what it brings to their businesses. Large companies such as Marks & Spencer could learn a lot from them.

The former Prime Minster said that the genuine living wage was

“an idea whose time has come”,

and yet here we are, six years on of Conservative rule, and it has not been implemented.

[James Berry]

Instead of making tendentious points about the name of this living wage, perhaps the hon. Lady will explain why her party’s manifesto at the last election did not include bringing the living wage up to the level of the London or national living wage?

[Liz McInnes]

I believe that my party’s manifesto championed a decent standard of living for all workers. [Interruption.] I will have to go back to the 2015 manifesto and see what we actually said and get back to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I do not think that we will be debating the manifesto.

[Liz McInnes]

I have no intention of debating the manifesto, but I appreciate the warning.

The time is now upon us to commit to making work truly pay. I hope that the current Prime Minister will not fall short on her promise to make

“Britain a country that works for everyone.”

I will give the last words to Lynn, my constituent. She wants the Government to step in and stop Marks & Spencer, as well as other companies, reducing their employees’ rates of pay via benefits just so they can pay the national living wage. I hope that this Government will rise to this challenge and do the right thing for Lynn, and for workers up and down the country. What “party of the workers” could refuse that?

BHS

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow so many great speakers. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) for his work and chairmanship of the Work and Pensions Committee in producing this joint report, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), whom I thank for his chairmanship of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. I also thank those hon. Members who have contributed by serving under their leadership on both Select Committees to help to conduct this investigation of the handling and failing governance of BHS.

It was my privilege to be in the Public Gallery when Sir Philip Green was called to appear before the Committee. It was an education for me to witness at first hand his dismissive and belligerent attitude, variously referring to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) as “your Lady” and requesting that the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) should “stop staring” at him. The title “Sir”, for those who choose to accept it, is bestowed upon those deemed to be deserving of the honour. With the title comes an expectation that a person will conduct themselves with respect and dignity, but that was sadly absent from Sir Philip’s performance on that day.

I would specifically like to concentrate on the BHS pension fund, rather than the possible stripping of Sir Philip Green’s knighthood. If he does lose his honorary title, I guess we will have to accept that it was an “honest mistake” to bestow the title upon him—unfortunately some honest mistakes, such as unloading BHS on to a serial bankrupt, are just bigger than others. Should Sir Philip be stripped of his knighthood, I suggest that, as a symbolic gesture, it is given to one of Sir Philip’s redundant employees. I would like to nominate Mr Grant Atterbury, who has chronicled the demise of BHS and his own experience of the shop floor in a series of very sad, funny, touching and eloquent articles via the pages of The Guardian. Mr Atterbury is still looking for work, and he writes:

“If anyone happens to know of any good jobs going that might suit a deeply cynical 43-year old whose key skills include folding towels and writing slightly bleak yet comical portraits of ramshackle department stores, do please get in touch.”

He lives in Kent, just in case any Member has a job that they might be interested in offering him.

Let me return to pensions. I am pleased to hear that negotiations have started in order to find a solution to the pensions problems faced by those who worked at BHS, but I raise concerns about to the speed of and commitment to the process. Sir Philip has made a vow to “rescue the pension scheme”, but unfortunately, according to the Pensions Regulator, it has yet to receive a “credible” offer to implement a deal. The Pensions Minister said yesterday that neither he nor the Government have received a written offer, which leaves 20,000 pensioners still uncertain about their investment and future, and how they will survive in retirement.

The joint report states:

“Sir Phillip Green systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS, paying very little tax and fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both.”

That is clearly unethical, immoral and in breach of section 172 of the Companies Act 2006, which states:

“A director of a company must act in the way he considers, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole, and in doing so have regard…to—

(a) the likely consequences of any decision in the long term,

(b) the interests of the company’s employees”.

I think there is cross-party agreement that Sir Philip failed to meet any of those requirements on any level. We in the House have an obligation to make sure that the regulatory body ensures that that section of legislation is implemented and that law is carried out.

It is imperative that a deal can be done and that Sir Philip makes a credible offer as soon as possible. He is on record as saying he did “everything possible” to stop BHS from going under. He should now be doing everything possible to protect these families from the hardship that his mismanagement may have left them in. As we have heard, he left BHS with a £571 million pension deficit, after taking it over in surplus. He took £400 million in dividends from the company and then sold the department store for a single pound, leading to 11,000 job losses and the final store’s closure last August. He has an obligation to those who worked hard in good faith within the BHS company to secure the settlement that is necessary to ensure the long-term viability of the pension scheme. During his appearance before the Select Committees, Sir Philip promised that he would “sort” the pension scheme. I say to him now: Sir Philip, get it sorted.

Student Loans Agreement

Liz McInnes Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for securing and leading the debate on this very important issue and for her work chairing the Petitions Committee. I also thank the 130,000 signatories who have highlighted to Parliament their dissatisfaction and concern about the changes to the student loan repayment structure. Many of those signatories come from areas that have Tory MPs. One could be forgiven for not realising that, given the attendance from Tory MPs in this debate, which I am pleased to note has recently increased by 200% from a grand total of none.

Since becoming an elected Member of this House, I have seen the Conservatives continually attacking workers’ rights and the healthcare system and freezing public sector wages. We have witnessed unequal cuts to welfare and local councils, as well as a substantial reduction in front-line police officers and firefighters, but no single group in society has been given as unfair a deal as our students. They have seen an unfair deal at every turn. There has been the loss of the education maintenance allowance, which gave people from the poorest backgrounds £30 a week. That might seem a small amount to some, but it gave 12,000 young people their only chance to go on to further education. Many of them went on to university. The coalition Government cut that allowance, and that affected my constituents in Heywood and Middleton. They found that they could no longer afford the bus fares to attend Hopwood Hall, a further education college in my constituency.

State sixth forms have lost a third of their funding, as it has not been ring-fenced from cuts. Mental health services have been overlooked and hugely underfunded. Youth support and advice services have been lost. There are also the changes to voter registration, the lowest rate of house building since the 1920s, the alteration of student nurses bursaries, which have been turned into loans, and the astronomical increase in tuition fees from £3,000 a year to £9,000 a year. In her role as Home Secretary, the new Prime Minster wrongly deported 48,000 international students, and that was before we voted for Brexit.

Students are clearly receiving the worst dealt hand of the lot. The retrospective changes to the student loan repayment system are unacceptable, unjust and underhand. As many Members and hon. Friends have pointed out, if the Government were a registered commercial company and made retrospective changes to their loan terms, the regulator would not permit the process. We are now the regulator in this House and we should not permit the process. We cannot and should not play politics with people’s education.

The average increase in loan repayments will be just under £2,000 across all graduates. As has been mentioned, those from the poorest 30% of households will repay an average of around £3,000 more under the new rules. Freezing the repayment threshold has a proportionately larger impact on repayments by graduates with lower lifetime earnings. All that equates to 2 million graduates who will end up paying £306 more each year by 2020-21 by comparison with 2016-17. The average student leaving university will have a debt of £44,000 before even acquiring his or her first job.

When the introduction of the tuition fees hike to £9,000 was announced in 2010, the former Prime Minster and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer said that students would only start paying the money back at a graduate’s salary, proclaiming that was “fairer” and “progressive” and “helped social mobility”. In 2015, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills looked at the current proposal and concluded that it would have a disproportionate impact on women, disabled students and students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. The National Union of Students calculated that students previously eligible for maintenance grants who took out their full loan entitlement on a three-year course would graduate with debts worth more than £50,000. That is not progressive; it is not fairer and it certainly does not help social mobility.

The change will not only affect students; it will also have a significant effect on the taxpayer. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that, in 2046, when the first set of graduates on £9,000-a-year fees can have their debts cancelled, £11.6 billion will be scrapped. That will increase to £19.9 billion only two years later. In total, 73% of graduates are now expected to never fully pay off their debt, by comparison with 32% under the old system. Figures from the Royal College of Nursing show that it would take 247 years to repay a NHS loan on a staff nurse’s salary. I know that life expectancy is increasing, but I had not realised that the Government expect it to be on that scale.

In their last two manifestos, the Government have said, “We should live within our means,” and, “We shouldn’t pass on levels of debt for future generations to pay,” yet we have seen the debt double to £1.7 trillion since 2010. We have now lost our triple A credit rating, all while burdening younger generations with £44,000-worth of debt before they even get on the job and housing ladder. That is unsustainable and unattainable.

It is now clear that it is the Conservatives who have been reckless and maxed out the nation’s credit card, and it is our children who will be footing the bill. I believe that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest. I hope that the Government will rethink this regressive policy, which is at the heart of all that is underhand, unscrupulous and unfair. If they do not, it will be seen as an act of betrayal for a generation. It is not just a financial and legal issue; most importantly, it is a moral issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Joseph Johnson]

I reject the characterisation of our labour market as a failure. Clearly, when we look at the unemployment figures today, we cannot but be struck by the extent to which we have succeeded in getting many thousands more young people into work. The latest unemployment data from the ONS show 23.1 million people working full time, which is 300,000 more than even a year ago, let alone than in 2010. The percentage of young people out of work is now at a record low altogether.

[Liz McInnes]

While the Minister is quoting employment figures, will he tell us how many of those jobs are high-paid graduate jobs?

[Joseph Johnson]

Graduates from our universities do spectacularly well on the whole in moving into graduate employment. Obviously, we want variability across the system to even out and we want to ensure less patchiness in the system, but graduates do go into graduate employment on the whole.

The funding system put into place is also progressive. Interest rates after graduation increase with income, so that high earners repay more. For those earning £21,000 or less, the interest rate is set at RPI flat: the loan balance does not increase in real terms. For borrowers who earn more than that, the interest rate increases to a maximum of RPI plus 3%. It is only fair that borrowers who have benefited most from their education should repay the most back into the system.

Student loans are very different from a mortgage or credit card debt. Repayments are determined by income, not the amount borrowed. Borrowers are protected. If at any point their income drops, so do their repayments. Borrowers will repay only if they earn above the threshold and the loans are cancelled after 30 years, so many borrowers, as I said, will not repay the full amount. That is part of the taxpayers’ investment in our country’s skills base.

I recognise hon. Members’ concerns that students may not be fully aware of the terms and conditions of their loans at the time of application. The Student Loans Company does, however, provide students with a clear statement of the terms before the student completes their application for a loan. On page 3 of “Student loans—a guide to terms and conditions”, it states clearly—this is not hidden in some small footprint—that

“The regulations may change from time to time and this means the terms of your loan may also change. This guide will be updated to reflect any changes and it’s your responsibility to ensure you have the most up-to-date version.”

Furthermore, it is worth noting that the threshold freeze did not actually change the terms and conditions; it merely left them unchanged.

That information includes the way that interest will be applied and the repayment terms that will apply. Students are asked explicitly to confirm that they understand the information before they are granted the loan. All the information that the SLC provides to students is reviewed regularly to ensure that it is both accurate and accessible.