Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, according to UUK, the UK higher education sector is a success story with a global reputation for excellence in teaching and research, supporting over 2.5 million students from the UK and around the world. I declare my interest as chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School. The University of Cambridge strongly believes that the success and global competitiveness of the UK’s universities rely on the core principles of sustainability, diversity and institutional autonomy. According to the Russell group’s report, Jewels in the Crown:

“International comparisons show that universities produce more outputs when they have the freedom to operate autonomously and face strong competition for people and funding”.

Martin Wolf wrote about the reform of Britain’s universities being,

“a betrayal of Conservative principles”,

and felt that the measures constitute a serious threat to Britain’s world-class and highly innovative universities.

I am proud to be the chancellor of the University of Birmingham, where we are very fortunate to have Professor Sir David Eastwood, one of the most respected figures in higher education in the UK and a former chief executive of HEFCE. As many noble Lords have said, he says that this is the first major change in the sector since the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which is just after I started Cobra Beer; it is a long time ago. It has lasted all this time, so what we are doing now will be there for a number of decades ahead. So this is really important; it is not just tampering around. He also makes the point that the UK has a co-regulatory approach that has maintained the autonomy of universities and relies on their own governance arrangements where appropriate, allowing universities such as Birmingham to be flexible and responsive to the needs of their students and employers, including shaping the curriculum in the light of the latest research findings, to think long term about global challenges and remain free from direct political interference. It is vital that that cornerstone of UK higher education is preserved throughout the Bill.

Then there is talk of removing royal charters, which are precious things. We should not just remove them—absolutely not.

The strength of our universities is based on collaboration. This wretched referendum has caused a big uncertainty about losing funding from the EU. But it is about much more than losing the funding—it is about the collaboration. When we at the University of Birmingham carry out our own research, we have a field-weighted citation impact of 1.87; when Harvard carries out its own research, it has a field-weighted average of 2.4; but when we co-author together it is an average of 5.69. That is the power of collaboration.

The Prime Minister wrote a letter to Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel laureate, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and president of the Royal Society, only five days after she came into office, saying:

“Our research base is enriched by the best minds from Europe and around the world—providing reassurance to these individuals and to UK researchers working in Europe will be a priority for the Government”.

We have the insecurity and anxiety caused by Brexit, and the Prime Minister’s refusal to provide that reassurance now, when 30% of academics at top universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham are foreign. One example from Birmingham is the discovery of or proof of the existence of gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s theory of relativity. Two of the professors working on that from Birmingham University are Professor Alberto Vecchio and Professor Andreas Freise, both EU scientists.

On higher education and the new organisation that has been formed, Times Higher Education reported that John Kingman, chair of the newly created UKRI, wrote that it is,

“nine brains in one body”,

explaining the governing philosophy of the research and innovation funding organisation. The noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, spoke about this. Do we really need to bring this all into one organisation? Stephen Curry of Imperial College said:

“Unlike schools, our universities compete nationally and internationally—indeed, this competition is one of the drivers of quality—and need the freedom to innovate in all sorts of ways … Excessive intrusion by the OfS could well stifle the vigour of the sector”.

We are already competing in a global arena. Then Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, talks about recruiting overseas students depending on rankings of universities. What is she talking about? I was the youngest university chancellor in this country when I was chancellor of Thames Valley University, now the University of West London. It had world-class excellence in areas such as hospitality and catering, something that Oxford and Cambridge could never do. Just because universities are lower down in the rankings, does that mean that they should not be able to recruit foreign students? I think that the Home Secretary needs to learn quite a few things.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, in her excellent speech spoke about students being against all this, but what about staff? The University and College Union feels that this is going to harm our globally renowned education system, as 15% of UK university staff are EU nationals and many more are from further afield. Of course, from India we have had a 50% drop in students since 2010; they feel that the Bill will do nothing to help this.

The best classroom teaching that I have experienced in my life was at the Harvard Business School, of which I am an alumnus. Professor Ranjay Gulati, whom I consulted on this, said that it was more about education, not evaluation—I am talking about the teaching framework. He feels that there should be measures that allow for guidelines in a holistic, not mechanical, way because that could be dangerous. It surely should be about teaching effectiveness, not teaching excellence. At Birmingham, we have teaching awards that come from the students, which is fantastic. Students look at world rankings and country rankings of universities.

To conclude, we have 450,000 international students in this country. I am the president of the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which represents those international students. On the Government’s attitude to international students—we continue to include and categorise international students as immigrants in the net migration figures, but this Bill is an opportunity once and for all to sort this out. I hope that we will address this and remove international students, sending out the signal that we welcome them. I know that our Minister, Jo Johnson, is totally onside with regard to this, and I hope that we can go ahead with it.

Finally, this is the brunt of it all—we are talking about a Bill and evolutionary reform, which we need, but the real essence of it is that we punch above our weight as a research nation. The UK represents 1% of the world’s population but accounts for 11.6% of citations and 15.9% of the world’s most highly cited articles. This is in spite of the UK spending only 1.7% of GDP on R&D. As to the £2 billion extra, if we want to catch up with the United States at 2.7% or Germany at 2.8%, it should be £20 billion more a year just to catch up. When it comes to higher education, we have the best universities in the world, and we do that by investing well under the US, the EU and the OECD averages as a proportion of GDP. That is the real crux of the matter.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Stevenson and his colleagues in what promises to be a full-scale and important debate on higher education. It is indeed odd, and even extraordinary, that universities are not mentioned in the Bill. I declare an interest, having been chancellor of Leeds University for the last 16 years.

En passant, I note the spectacularly impressive number of academics of the highest achievement who have expressed serious reservations and opposition to much of the Bill. Surely, in this House more than any other, we believe that the voices of experts, especially of such calibre—many of whom are in this House now—ought to be listened to and recognised as the best wisdom available on the subject.

The Government seem intent on a pincer movement, first introducing free-market rules that could best be described as downmarket options. New colleges called new providers—George Orwell would have loved that—will be able to acquire degree-awarding powers without having to build up a track record by teaching another university’s degree first. None of that boring old research and listening preparation nonsense for this Government, it seems.

The current university system could be called a fine example of the marketplace at its best—there is much talk of the marketplace. There is heavy, open competition for entrance to universities, and heavy competition for lectureships and professorships. When universities put in for grants and funds they realise they are competing with many other universities—sometimes all over the world—and they work out the most competitive as well as the most scholastically satisfactory proposal. This is a marketplace of the mind, but none the less a marketplace and an increasingly key one for the future. Our universities embrace and revel in it.

One of the reasons for this effective balance between learning and earning lies in the autonomy and individuality of our universities. They are not one size fits all, beholden to the state or looking forward to launching themselves on the FTSE 100. They are, to use a phrase of Alan Bennett’s, just “keeping on keeping on” at a high level in different but effective ways, with fertile variations, with their primary purpose: scholarship. As we know, the consequences of scholarship can increasingly be very profitable, wide-ranging across the whole of society and, from the evidence we have, increasingly essential to the success of a 21st-century economy, which, in so many other areas, has found this country wanting. But the heart of it is learning, and the heart of that is the curiosity to pursue knowledge for the sake of more knowledge. Key to that is a certain looseness and confidence in individual and often idiosyncratic needs—private space, in short, for what our greatest scientists and writers in the humanities have always needed to generate their best work. This cannot be legislated for: it is an individual-to-individual decision. This heavy-handed state control is the enemy to that free-ranging condition.

The clamp of the Government’s decision to create a new body—a central control unit—the Office for Students, is anathema to freedom, of which we need more, not less. It would impose another layer of regulation. Goodness knows, universities in this country, like schools, hospitals and the Government themselves, are all but disappearing under the tangleweed of overregulation. Who will run these new bodies, which will interfere so radically in the affairs of the variety of universities? How will they be trained? Where will they come from? How will they know more than those already working hard inside the universities who are the best people? They are already there inside the universities. All of these universities, from the ancient to the relatively new, have built up through expertise and expediency individual and ingenious ways to ride the tide of the times. There is danger of strangulation by bureaucracy.

As they take an increasingly important place in our society as one of the few success stories of the last few decades, universities are being asked to do more, which they are doing. They have now become the forum for disputes about free speech, and it is in universities where unacceptable and destructive racist attitudes must be and will continue to be challenged, I trust. In cities thoughtlessly stripped of traditional industries it is universities that have often provided the new hub of hope in the place.

No doubt others will itemise ways universities can be improved, and I look forward to hearing that. though, we must declare and itemise their current strengths. Universities must be high on the agenda—as high as they are on the ladder of learning in this country. I look forward to the Minister confirming that he will go along with the amendment.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, the amendment is very important for one reason. Having taken part in Second Reading, I declare my interests once again as chancellor of the University of Birmingham, chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School, and honorary fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge—I could go on.

This is a once-in-many-decades opportunity to improve the higher education sector in this country. One could argue that we have the best universities in the world, along with the United States, in spite of underfunding. The key issue is that we underfund our universities. If we put in the funding equivalence of the United States of America, or of the European Union, or the OECD average it in itself would improve our universities hugely. But, as an entrepreneur building businesses, I live by the mantra not of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but of restless innovation, of the world belonging to the discontent.

To that extent, I applaud the Bill’s objective to try to improve our universities. I also recognise the Minister, Jo Johnson, for his commitment to this, for listening through the entire Second Reading, and for being here with us today. I know he and his department will listen, as, I hope, will the Minister.

I therefore agree with the noble Lords, Lord Waldegrave and Lord Willetts, that the use of “must” in this clause does not make sense in many circumstances. For example, in India, 1.5 million students apply to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology. The first cut is 130,000. Ten thousand of them make it. Some of the brightest people in the world have come out of that funnel and run some of the biggest organisations in the world today. It has nothing to do with engineering, but it is a specialist engineering science institution. Caltech is always ranked among the top universities in the world. It is a pure science institution. One cannot therefore prescribe that all universities must do everything, but the spirit of this amendment is absolutely right: that universities on the whole must strive for variety.

[Lord Giddens]

Caltech has a range of other departments, including philosophy, history, social sciences and English.

[Lord Bilimoria]

I was stressing that it focuses on technology—that is its strength and why it wins all those Nobel prizes—but I acknowledge what the noble Lord says.

I go back to areas of specialisation and the purpose of universities. The mindset of certain people, including in this country, is, “You should study at university what you can apply in a job thereafter”—that is, a sort of vocational mindset. Our universities are not what that is about. My oldest son is reading theology at Cambridge. I do not think that he is going to become a priest, but if he wants to, that is up to him. I do not think that that will happen—he will probably become a management consultant—but what he will learn in that environment is phenomenal. He gets one-to-one supervisions with world leaders in his subject. Not every university does that or can afford to do it, but he has that ability. I consulted Cambridge on this. It said that it recognises the importance of diversity in research and teaching and that the success of global competitiveness of the UK’s universities relies on the core principles of sustainability, diversity and—here is the crux of it—institutional autonomy. That is what worries so many of us about this Bill and why this proposed new clause, right up-front, is so important. It is the spirit of it that I completely support.

The pro-vice-chancellor for education at Cambridge, Graham Virgo, has spoken about the last part of the amendment, which is about being a critic and conscience of society. To narrow down the definition just to teaching and research will be to miss the opportunity to improve our universities and to miss the point. Professor Virgo pointed by way of example to the New Zealand Education Act 1989, which had five criteria for defining a university. The fifth of those was for an institution to accept a role as a critic and conscience of society. That is so important and it is why the amendment sets right up-front the essence of what universities should strive to be about, so that we do not go down the wrong track in this once-in-many-decades opportunity to improve our already fantastic, best-of-the-best, proud, jewel-in-the-crown universities.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, support the spirit of this amendment, and I declare an interest as emeritus professor at Loughborough University and a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. I apologise that I was not able to speak at Second Reading, but I suspect that my contribution was not missed among the 70-odd people who did speak. I have read the debate, and very thoughtful it was. The clear thread running through a large number of contributions from all sides of the House was the perceived threat to university autonomy and academic freedom. I fear that those concerns were not assuaged by the Minister’s assurances, hence the motive behind the amendment.

The fears have to be set in the context of what is widely seen as the creeping marketisation and consumerisation of universities. As my noble friend Lady Bakewell put it, students are now consumers of a product, as if a university were a department store. Many would argue that all that is precious about universities in terms of the development of critical thinking, and in particular encouraging students to think critically and not simply accept what they are given, is being increasingly subordinated to an instrumentalist, economistic concept of a university as in effect a degree factory feeding UK plc.

I suspect the Minister will say that the amendment is not necessary because the Government have said they are committed to the key principles it contains. But surely there would be no better way of demonstrating that commitment than by either accepting the amendment or, given that a number of noble Lords have pointed to possible weaknesses in the wording—and my noble friend on the Front Bench has made it clear that he is not wedded to the exact wording—offering to bring forward their own amendment setting out what a university is and the principles it should pursue. That would show their commitment and establish a clear framework for our deliberations on the Bill. In doing so, the Government would go some way to reassuring both Members of your Lordships’ House and the many organisations and individual academics who have written to us to express their fears that the Bill is taking us too far down a road that is incompatible with the basic principles of what a university is and what a university should be.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, after the excellent first day in Committee, when we heard from chancellors and former chancellors and current professors, readers and masters, I reflected that nearly all of them had come from what we might regard as a traditional university. When we think of a university, we think of a young person going into the sixth form and leaving at 18 to do a three-year degree course. The importance of university includes going away from home, and campus life. Of course, that is changing dramatically in this country, and it will continue to change as we look at different ways of learning in higher education. That is why the points made by my noble friend Lady Garden are important—we need in this Bill to reflect the importance of part-time and distance learning. That is important particularly, as she rightly said, for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds, who may be living on a council estate in Merseyside or Sheffield and for whom the notion of coming to London is exciting but challenges their ability to afford that higher education opportunity. The figures show that many young people are traditionally going to the university where they live, and many more will start to do part-time study. I know that the Minister will say, “When we use the word university, it is implicit that we mean all forms of higher education”, but, as my noble friend said, we should be clear about the importance of distance and part-time higher education learning.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I shall address the point about part-time and lifelong learning, and speak from my own experience. When I qualified as a chartered accountant, with a degree from India, and with a law degree from Cambridge, I thought that I had had enough education for ever. Then I was introduced to lifelong learning by going to business school and engaging in executive education, which I have since done at Cranfield School of Management, the London Business School and the Harvard Business School. I remember President Clinton saying, “The more you learn, the more you earn”, and one can try to vouch for that.

The encouragement of lifelong learning is so important—it does not stop. Then there is access to lifelong learning for those who missed out on it, for whatever reason. I was the youngest university chancellor in the country when I was made chancellor of Thames Valley University, now the University of West London. At that university, which is one of the modern universities, a huge proportion of the students were mature students and learning part-time. You cannot equate a university such as that with an Oxford or a Cambridge. It is a completely different model, offering access and focusing on—and promoting the concept of—lifelong learning, mature students and part-time learning. Sadly, the funding for part-time learning needs to be looked at, but it is not a matter for this Bill.

At the other extreme, at the traditional universities, we have MBAs—masters in business administration—which are very popular around the world, but nowadays we also have executive MBAs. The executive MBA programme is getting more and more popular at top business schools around the world, including in our country —I am the chair of the Cambridge Judge Business School. It is part-time learning at the highest level.

I hope that the Bill will address this and encourage part-time learning and learning throughout one’s lifetime. Amendment 41 refers to,

“including access to part-time study and lifelong learning”.

In fact, I would encourage it; it is crucial.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I welcome this brief debate. It is crucial that we should turn our attention to different forms of access and to lifelong learning in its widest sense. The publication from the four years that I was Education and Employment Secretary that I remain most proud of is The Learning Age Green Paper. I am proud of the commitment of the then Government to the whole range of opportunities for lifelong learning.

I deeply regret that universities as a whole in this country countenanced the demise of their extramural outreach at a time when more utilitarian delivery was uppermost in people’s minds. I pay tribute to Sheffield Hallam University for its outreach, embracing those from a whole range of disadvantaged backgrounds. I declare an interest: I have a close relationship with the University of Sheffield, where I hopefully deliver some pearls of wisdom and experience from a lifetime engaged in education, and I welcome its renewed commitment to lifelong learning. However, universities using resources, expertise and facilities to reach out is still in embryo.

Digital platforms now allow us to communicate at a distance. Over past decades, the Open University has been able to link that effectively to collective study and engagement; that is a crucial part of a rounded education that we can all welcome. I hope that when the Minister responds, he will, in a wider sense than just this Bill, encourage and support universities to use those resources to reach out and become essential parts of their own community, as well reaching out internationally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, we are effectively talking about the criteria that will be used by the relevant offices to register, deregister and reregister universities. There is not much in the Bill that tells us what the criteria are—I have an amendment later that will bear on this question. If, for example, a university put considerable and unusual effort into access provision, or indeed did nothing at all, would that affect the need to reregister, or would it enhance the position of a new institution wanting to register as participating in the whole higher education system? This is a plea for more information. Who will provide advice to the relevant offices, whether it is the Office for Fair Access or the Office for Students, in the work they carry out? This could be a crucial way of extending access.

When I was at the University of Edinburgh, the most important access work that we did was to work with a local further education college and provide a one-year programme taught jointly by the university and the college. Marvellous students went through there, one of whom ended up, interestingly, as the chair of the Scottish Funding Council for higher education. She was someone who went through this programme, came through the university and benefited from it. I should like to think that when we are discussing the quality of the education provided, this is exactly the kind of point that might be brought out and whose significance should be made something of.

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, may I request that the Minister reassures us that, when we talk about access, the Bill covers diversity and, in particular, ethnic minority children and students coming to universities? I saw the importance of this for myself at Cambridge University, when we started a summer course called GEEMA. The ethnic minority students who attended the course came primarily from families who had no previous university experience. I remember giving out the certificates for one of the first courses, when 60 students from all over the country attended and were mentored by ethnic minority undergraduate students already at the university. Of the 60, many not only went on to university but went on to the University of Cambridge. Programmes such as this are very effective; are we doing enough to promote that access through the Bill?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and will speak to Amendments 85 and 127 in my name. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I wondered about the linkage with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, but he talked about transparency and accountability, which we are also talking about. The amendments in my name were previously tabled in the Commons by the Liberal Democrats but they reflect numerous debates on this subject in both Houses over the years.

The intention of the amendments is to highlight the very significant impact of international students on UK universities, in particular the contribution they make to the financial health of an individual university. Previous debates and reports in both Houses have rightly concluded that counting international students in migration targets is a poor policy choice, damages the reputation of UK universities and should be reversed. We shall discuss these issues in much more detail when we debate the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, later on.

In connection with the amendments in this group, and to set the context, almost everyone agrees that including students within the net migration target is wrong. The list of those who have spoken out includes: the BIS Select Committee in its 2012 report; 68 university vice-chancellors, who wrote on the subject to David Cameron, warning about the impact on universities’ reputation, also in 2012; the Institute of Directors and other business groups; Philip Hammond, indeed, who suggested conversations were going on in government about this until Theresa May publicly slapped him down; and even David Cameron, who, according to Max Chambers, his former home affairs adviser, had decided to take students out of the immigration target and,

“planned to do so after the EU referendum”—

ah, the best-laid plans of mice, men and politicians.

It is not even a question of public opinion. A YouGov poll from May last year showed that 57% of the public said that foreign students should not be in the figures, compared to only 32% who thought they should. The fact that they are included makes us somewhat of an anathema even among our closest international allies. President Obama has previously spoken about the need for the US to welcome foreign students and Australia, the country with the very points-based immigration system promised—and now abandoned—by the leave campaign, changed its system in 2012 to position Australia as a preferred study destination for international students.

The Government’s justification for the continued policy has been the international rules around reporting of migrant numbers. However, as the Migration Observatory at Oxford has made clear, there is a big difference between the migration statistics and the Government’s self-imposed migration target. The amendments do not, however, seek to override the Government’s decision. They simply ask them to put their money where their mouth is by ensuring that the value of these students to universities is made public each year, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has set out in his amendments, too.

Among my amendments, there is one where the provider would have to provide information about the fees charged to international students and, in Amendment 127, the OfS would have to set out in its report,

“the financial contribution of international students to English higher education providers”.

If the Government want to continue to stand in the way of this consensus, they should be made to do so publicly and in the face of statistics. These amendments would therefore play a minor but important role in informing public debate on this issue.

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I start by declaring my interest as a third-generation former international student in this country: both my grandfathers, my mother and I were, and now my son is, at Cambridge University.

The benefits that international students bring to this country and to our universities are enormous and priceless. It is our biggest element of soft power. There are 30 world leaders at any one time who have been educated at British universities. Generation-long links are built and, most importantly, the international students enrich the experience of our domestic students and universities. Then of course there is the money: directly and indirectly, £14 billion is brought in by international students to our universities and they create employment for 130,000 people. Yet every single time the issue has been debated in this Chamber, we have had unanimous consensus except from the Minister responding. A straight bat is played back to us, with a no.

The country does not think that international students are immigrants. The public do not mind international students staying on and working for a while after they finish their studies. This wretched referendum has brought immigration together into one bad thing and the Government insist on categorising international students as immigrants. There may be a UN definition, but when you come to calculate your net migration figures, you do not have to include international students as migrants. Our competitor countries—the United States, Australia and Canada—do not include them.

Statistics are available to show that international students, on the whole, return to their countries; those statistics are not being released. Can the Minister tell us why? I believe these figures show that only 1.5% of international students, if that—it may be 1,500—overstay and do not go back. We have removed the exit checks from our borders, so we do not know who has left our country. We should be scanning every passport, EU and non-EU, into and out of this country. We should introduce visible exit checks at our ports and borders immediately; we would then have that information at our fingertips and we should release it.

I declare an interest as president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which represents the 450,000 international students at all our educational institutions in this country. We despair that these students who bring this benefit to this country are not acknowledged. In fact, the perception that this creates is terrible. I know for a fact that Jo Johnson, the Minister for Universities, is very supportive of international students. I have seen that personally. He is here and I thank him for his support, which I know is genuine. However, I am sorry to be very personal but we have a Prime Minister who, when she was Home Secretary, said that every international student should leave the day that they graduated. The headlines in India were, “Take our money and get out”. That is the perception created.

I have had the Australian high commissioner to India say to me, “What are you doing with your attitude to international students? We have a Minister for International Students in Australia and we welcome them. In fact, if they want to stay on and pass through all the filters, they are welcome because they have paid for their education and will benefit our economy. On the other hand, you are turning them away and turning them to us, for which we are very grateful”. We are being made a laughing stock. There is an increase in international students around the world of 8% a year from countries such as India. As our former Prime Minister David Cameron said, we are in a global race. Well, we are not in that race if this is the attitude and perception that we give out.

If the Prime Minister is not willing to listen and if, sadly, the perception of immigration is so bad that the good people who visit this country—the tourists, business visitors and international students, and in fact the migrants who benefit this country over the generations, and without whom we would not be the successful country we are and the fifth-largest economy in the world—are not appreciated, then the only way to address this is through legislation. An amendment would say, “We must declare and detail the actual benefits and contributions of international students at our universities”. It is the only way that the Government will listen, and if they continue to include international students in the net migration figures then the amendment coming up in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is the only way that we will be able to address this. We will do that down the line and say, “Let’s legislate that they should be excluded when counting net migration figures”. This is very important because it goes to our soft power, to the impression we create around the world as a country and to our economy and universities. It is part of what has made our universities the best in the world and this country so wonderful.

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, in supporting the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, perhaps I could give the Committee the benefit of the experience that I have had in the past four years. I have just completed a four-year term as the Prime Minister’s trade and cultural envoy to south-east Asia. In that role, I got to know very well the Education Ministers of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos—all really excellent people who had a tremendous respect for the education system in this country. Over that period of four years, I failed ever to explain our visa policy. I would go further: they were really offended by it. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are not known for the export of terrorism. They are rapidly developing countries and in the case of Vietnam, an important rapidly developing country that sees itself as a world player and which we are prioritising in our post-Brexit determination for a bilateral trade agreement. Try to imagine what it is like to sit in the Cabinet of those countries and be told, “Your students are being grouped as potential terrorists”. It is offensive and it damages us. It is foolish and damages our universities and international reputation. I was deeply ashamed of the arguments that I was forced to put up, all of which were spurious and none of which were defensible.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak today. I declare my membership of the Foundation for Science and Technology, chaired by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and my honorary professorship of the University of Cambridge. The comments I wish to make cut across many of the amendments that we have discussed, both now and earlier.

Reading the Bill as it stands, you could believe that from a research point of view the UK was an island sufficient unto itself. There is almost no reference here to any international work. I think the noble Lord, Lord Willis, made a passing reference to that in one of his interventions in today’s debate, but it is crucial. There are whole areas of science in this country where we would not have a presence without successful international collaboration. A very good example is marine work. Marine research ships are very expensive to run, and frequently they have been run in collaboration with other countries. One could also mention big science facilities.

My concern with the Bill as it stands is that paragraph 16(3) of Schedule 9, which deals with supplementary powers, says:

“UKRI may not do any of the following except with the consent of the Secretary of State: … enter into joint ventures”.


Does this mean that if one of our research councils or other parts of UKRI wish to set up a collaboration with one of their opposite numbers, be it on the other side of the Atlantic, in mainland Europe or anywhere else, they have to go to the Secretary of State before they can do so? I hope that that is not the case, and that the importance of international work can be a little more clearly expressed in the Bill before we finally approve it.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chancellor of the University of Birmingham and chair of the advisory board of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. On that note, if I may boast, today the FT global rankings for the MBA came out and the Judge Business School rose from number 10 to number five in the world. This is a business school that has been around for only 26 years, compared with the Harvard Business School, which is over 100 years old. One of the reasons for that success is the excellence of research at a university like Cambridge.

The problem that is overlooked completely by the Bill is that we in this country carry out excellent research despite underfunding it compared with competitor countries. We spend 1.7% of GDP, compared with 2.8% in the USA and Germany. Our research councils, which are world-class and respected around the world, have been doing a great job as autonomous units. One of the main worries about the Bill in universities and research councils is the removal of the autonomy of these institutions. They function well thanks to that autonomy.

I support Amendment 490D from the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which would leave out the words “as UKRI may determine”. Under Clause 89, headed, “Exercise of functions by science and humanities Councils”, UKRI would have the right to determine what they do. This is absolutely wrong. Whatever the reasons the Government have given for having a layer like UKRI, many people—the noble Lord, Lord Rees, has argued well against it—have said it is completely not necessary and could be damaging to the whole sector. The analogy made was setting up a body to represent all the world-class museums in London, which are the best museums in the world. That would be completely unnecessary as they are doing a great job on their own. We have to ensure that the autonomy of the research councils is protected, whatever happens, even with the existence of this body called UKRI.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay kindly referred to my usual clarity. I fear, in so far as I ever had any clarity, it is rapidly dissipating as time goes on. Still, I will try to respond to many of the issues that have been raised in this very interesting debate.

I shall start with the governance relationship between research councils and UKRI. I will resist the temptation to address the broader issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, but I recognise that the UK still underfunds research compared with many of our competitor countries. Nevertheless, the £2 billion increase coming into UK research in 2020 is a significant change. One has to ask oneself whether that would have come about without UKRI being about to become our key co-ordinating research body.

Through Clause 89 the research councils retain their right to make decisions within their respective discipline areas. I assure noble Lords that UKRI must arrange for the seven research councils to carry out their roles and functions within their areas of activity. UKRI cannot prevent any of the research councils carrying out their functions in their respective areas.

I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay for pointing out that references to “humanities” are in fact defined in the Bill, in Clause 105. It makes it very clear that they are defined as including the arts, and references to “sciences” include social sciences.

In discussions in the other place, the Government were clear that funding allocations would be made to each of the councils by the Government in the UKRI grant letter. Delegated authority limits will be set for the research councils to operate independently but additional approvals may be needed, including from the UKRI board, in line with current government best practice.

It is an important part of these reforms that UKRI will empower the councils to work together. The amendments would not prevent UKRI operating in this manner, but would obscure our intent for UKRI to take strategic decisions and facilitate development of the overall direction.

To address the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, this reform is about far more than efficiency savings or a reduction in bureaucracy. We must deliver these where we have the opportunity to, but not at the expense of the strengths of the current system. However, the removal of the current duplication of back-office functions across multiple bodies will ultimately drive efficiency savings and reduce the administrative burdens placed on research and innovation leaders, freeing them up to focus on strategic decision-making. It will also help to deliver simplified systems and processes for funding recipients.

On Amendments 485C and 195A, I welcome the opportunity to assure noble Lords that UKRI’s core purpose is to seek to improve the UK’s science and knowledge base, and it will seek to improve knowledge and understanding through research. Advancing knowledge is a critical role of the whole of the UK research base, including UKRI and the research councils, and we will look carefully at this matter before we return to the House on Report. I share the aspiration of the noble Lords, Lord Willis and Lord Cameron, for UKRI to support research programmes that can help to shape government policy, ensure resilience and respond to key challenges facing the UK.

On social inclusion, community cohesion and social and cultural well-being, I am certain that the current duty on councils to consider the desirability of improving quality of life is sufficient to cover these.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 30th January 2017 Lords Chamber

The measures proposed in the amendments, particularly Amendments 495D and the earlier one, head in the right direction. I am not suggesting that the Secretary of State should give carte blanche; that is unrealistic. However, once we have thought through the implications of Innovate UK being within UKRI, it has to be clear to members of the business community—after all, it rightly looks to Innovate UK as something facing them—that there is not going to be mega-interference from people on the UKRI board who are much more interested in the other end of the spectrum than in its part, which is about developing innovative products with commercial possibilities and possibilities for improving our quality of life.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, last year I shared a platform with the chief executive of Innovate UK at the International Festival for Business in Liverpool. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Mair about the great work it is doing and how important it is for our economy to encourage innovation and the translation of research from universities to business. Is it not ironic that here we have this Bill about which our greatest worry is its threat to autonomy—the autonomy of our universities, of our research institutions and, now, of Innovate UK? We cannot in any way stifle Innovate UK’s work or its ability to partner with or have joint ventures with organisations or to be innovative in itself. We cannot spoil Innovate UK being innovative. I urge the Government to listen to the amendment in the name of my noble friends Lady Brown, Lord Mair and Lord Broers and enable Innovate UK to be innovative itself.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)]

My Lords, I will begin by saying that I agree 100% with the principles behind many of the amendments in this group. It is absolutely right that Innovate UK should have as much autonomy as possible over all matters related to its remit and mission. We are fully agreed on that. However, I disagree with my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones. I fundamentally believe that Innovate UK will be better off within UKRI and that bringing together into one organisation research and the translation of research will create a much stronger one. I also feel that, when it comes to negotiating budgets with the Treasury and the like, again Innovate UK will be much better off within UKRI than if it were a separate body.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (CB)]

When the Minister replies, perhaps he could say something about the role of UKRI in the thinking about regulatory harmonisation. Would he like to say something to create a bit of certainty regarding medical research, clinical trials and so on?

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, today I hosted a group of education leaders from India and in our discussion, they asked: “What are your worries about Brexit when it comes to the UK education sector?”. In listing my worries, a list which is too long to talk about now, I stated that one of my biggest concerned research. It is all very well for the Government to say, “We’ll keep giving you the funding for research that we get from the European Union, even if we leave”, but it is much more important than that. That is why I support Amendment 488 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.

The key to research is collaboration. Already, we are seeing EU-funded research universities in Europe not partnering with UK universities because they are worried that we will be leaving the European Union. If I may illustrate the power of collaborative research, while I was in India in November, at the same time as the Prime Minister and the Universities Minister, Jo Johnson, the University of Birmingham held a workshop with the Panjab University. There we showed the power of collaborative research: when the University of Birmingham conducts research, our field-weighted citation impact is 1.87. The Panjab University figure is 1.37. Yet when we carry out collaborative research, the impact is 5.64, or three times the Birmingham figure. When we do research with Harvard University—I am an alumnus of the Harvard Business School—while Birmingham’s impact is 1.87 and Harvard’s is 2.4, our combined impact is 5.69. This is serious. We must encourage collaborative research with the European Union and this amendment should be in the Bill.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, I think we are all pretty much in violent agreement about the critical importance of collaboration across countries, but also about being able to attract the best and brightest to the UK. There is no question about that. When one hears the story from the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, about individuals who have decided not to come here for various reasons because of Brexit, it is depressing. On the other hand, only today Novo Nordisk, the big Danish pharmaceutical company and diabetes specialist, announced that it is investing £100 million at Oxford. AstraZeneca is also building its global research facilities at Cambridge. The truth is that anecdotes can be misleading and that the jury is out.

We have to demonstrate to the international community that we are open for business, and persuade it that that is the case. Other countries have similar issues at the moment. I imagine that many scientists in the USA are thinking, “Should we stay in the US or move?”. Scientists in other parts of Europe will be thinking similar things. We have to demonstrate to this increasingly internationally mobile part of the community that Britain is the place to be. I was struck that at the Crick institute, some 34% of all its principal investigators are EU nationals, which illustrates that it is essential that we reassure them of their welcome here.

That is what the Prime Minister has been doing. She said in her Lancaster House speech on 17 January that we will,

“welcome agreement to continue to collaborate with our European partners on major science, research, and technology initiatives”.

She went on to describe her vision of,

“a secure, prosperous, tolerant country—a magnet for international talent and a home to the pioneers and innovators who will shape the world ahead”.

There should be no doubt that the Government are fully apprised of this issue and that we are determined to be, as the Prime Minister said, a magnet for international talent. I do not suppose that the country is going to be glued to reading Hansard tomorrow, but it worth making that point on any opportunities that we get.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly address Amendments 2 and 8, which talk about part-time, adult and distance learning. When I am presiding over degree ceremonies as chancellor of the University of Birmingham, it gives me such pleasure when we have not just mature students but really mature students—students in their 60s—coming up to graduate. Whatever we do in this Bill, we must encourage lifelong learning and adult education. From 2005 to 2010, I was the youngest university chancellor in the country, as chancellor of Thames Valley University, which is now the University of West London. There, we had a motto: “further and higher”. The Bill must encourage progression, so that once people are exposed to higher education, they have the opportunity to go further. Quite often, it is just a question of experiencing it.

Finally, Amendment 87 is about access and participation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has spoken about. It is crucial that this is reported on and acknowledged fundamentally in the Bill. I have seen this first hand at the University of Cambridge, where the GEEMA programme brings to a summer school ethnic minority students who have no background of university education in their families. When they attend this course, they are exposed to Cambridge—somewhere they probably would never have even considered. The reality is that the majority end up going to university, and quite a few of them end up going to Cambridge. This must be encouraged, and it is crucial that it is part of the Bill.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak briefly to my amendment on mental health and also support the comments that have been made on young people with dyslexia or disabilities. I preface my remarks by reminding us all how much progress has been made on mental health over the past decade or so. In fact, this Government, like the previous one, recognise the issue and have done an incredible amount of work.

We have had various debates on this, and I am sure that all noble Lords who have declared an interest as a chancellor would want to ensure that when young people go to their universities, they are given all the support that they need. For many young people, it is a huge step to go to university. You would therefore expect that while they are away at university, that support would be there for them. In schools, teachers are in loco parentis. Of course, it is young adults who attend university, but many of them still need the support that they would get at home. As parents, therefore, we would be devastated if that support was not available when there was a mental health problem. This simple amendment to say that mental health support should be available and that students should know of it is therefore vital.

Many universities provide incredible support and do stunning work for young people. However, there are many that do not. In Committee, I gave a personal example of a family friend with two girls at two separate universities. Their father very suddenly and tragically died. One university gave no support at all to that young girl, who was going through anguish and mental trauma—she was not even seen by her personal tutor. The other university could not do enough to help. That is the reason for this amendment: we must make sure that that support is there for all students and it is not just left to the university itself.

Of course this is not just about students, it is about the staff as well. We put great pressure on the people working in higher education and, therefore, support for them should be in place. Perhaps personal tutors could be trained to identify when there are mental health problems and are able to advise the student where to go. So I hope that, in his reply, the Minister will make some positive sounds about this important issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, hearing the words “TEF metrics” made me come to my feet, because a consistent theme to run through our debates on the Bill has been the developing understanding that the metrics are wholly inadequate and, in particular, that the national student survey is not the basis for any judgments on teaching quality.

I am glad that the Government have moved as far as they have on the NSS and the metrics—now we are getting a thorough review; the metrics related to the NSS are being officially described as the least important of the metrics before us; for smaller institutions more scope is being given; and so on. That is all good news, but what seems knocking on bizarre is to plough on with bringing in this link between fees and the TEF before we have got the TEF right. It would be logical to get the TEF right first, see whether the metrics can be made to work and get them all in some sort of order, and then, when you have done that, you can seriously consider whether to have a link with fees. But when the TEF is such a self-evident mess, why put all your money on having the fees link, which will make people even angrier at the effects of the TEF? Why not show a little patience? The Government believe in linking the TEF and fees; others in this House do not. The Government would give themselves the best chance of proving themselves right and the sceptics wrong if they gave time for the TEF to settle down before they brought in the fees link.

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I remind your Lordships that when the Browne report came out at the beginning of the coalition Government, the change was introduced to increase fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in one go and to convert to a loan system. I remember tabling a regret Motion at the time. The argument then was that a market would be created so that students would go for universities and courses that were better value for them, but what I highlighted in my Motion was that the Government were withdrawing funding on the one hand and tripling the fees on the other. In the five years since the change was implemented, there has been no market; universities across the board have had to increase their fees virtually to the maximum £9,000, because funding was withdrawn at the other end. For students, it was a double whammy. Their fees were tripled in one go—I suggested that it should have been phased in—and they are now saddled with loans of tens of thousands of pounds that they have to pay off. On the other hand, for the universities, there is a £9,000 figure which for some subjects—science and engineering, let alone medicine—is nowhere near enough to provide that type of teaching.

This is a Hobson’s choice. You can understand the students’ point of view—they are already paying £9,000; they were paying £3,000 and they got the loans; they do not want the fees to go up—and you can understand the universities’ point of view: they want to provide the best possible research, teaching and facilities for their students, but they have had no increase in their fees for five years. In real terms, the £9,000 is already down to just over £8,000. Now we have this further linkage with teaching.

I want your Lordships to understand that this is not easy. Universities operate in a challenging environment. We are competing with the whole world. We have the best universities in the world along with the United States of America. Our research is fantastic. I am proud of our universities, but in many ways we have our hands tied behind our backs. I applaud our students and our universities.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I can see why the Government want to link the quality of teaching to fees. I assume that behind it is that they need a kind of sanction to do something about those universities which are not providing adequate teaching. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that the best teaching is not necessarily provided by those universities which do the best research; in other words, the high-status universities. Some of the new universities have excellent teaching quality, where some of the best research universities do not give it enough attention.

I support what my noble friend Lord Lipsey said. It is not the right time to attach the decision about the fees that can be charged to the TEF, because we do not have a TEF that is yet suitable and up to scratch in how it will operate. It is putting the cart before the horse. There may be some date in the future when it might be appropriate for the ability to increase fees to be related to the quality of teaching, but we have not reached that point. We really need to get our metrics right and provide a TEF that is fit for the job that it is being asked to do.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I support the amendments to which I have put my name and agree with everything that both noble Lords have said so far.

When the Higher Education and Research Bill was first introduced, both Ministers pointed out that the environment in which higher education takes place has changed dramatically in recent years, and indeed it has. Very large numbers of students now take out large loans in the belief, and with the confidence, that the institutions they attend have in some sense been guaranteed by government—that what they are doing is safe in that they will be able to complete their studies. Fortunately, in most cases that is true, but of course it is not always or necessarily true. Anybody who looks at the experience in other countries will realise that institutions do fail, and indeed some of our non-degree-awarding institutions have failed in the past. The Competition and Markets Authority says cheerfully on its website that the sign of a healthy sector is that some exit occurs. Exit sounds quite cool—unless you happen to be one of the students in an exiting institution.

At the same time as this Bill is going through, the Technical and Further Education Bill is being debated, mostly in the Moses Room. As I attend the sittings of both Bills, part of the time I whinge but mostly it is a very informative exercise because we now have a tertiary sector as much as anything else. However, the protections being introduced for students in further education colleges go well beyond anything that has been specified for students in higher education, and that is highly regrettable. It is really important that in this new and changed environment, we realise that students need new and changed protection.

To give an example, for a long time the training sector has had many quite small, and sometimes quite large, rapidly changing institutions. Just before these Bills were introduced in the House, we heard the first story of a training provider that went into liquidation, leaving many people with outstanding loans and no obvious recourse. In the few weeks that both Bills have started to work their way through the House, there have been two other such failures. I shall be happy to give their names to anyone who is curious to know them, but, once again, we are left with, in this case, adult learners who have loans but no ongoing course.

When I raised this issue with the Minister and officials, I was told that the risks were lower for university students because they were more mobile and less local. However, that really is not true. It is not true of my own, but it is true of many of our university institutions that they have home students who are almost all highly local—often because they come from less advantaged families and are very unhappy about taking out major maintenance loans. So they are very local, and if their institution fails, they do not have anywhere else to go.

I hope very much that Ministers feel able, ideally, to accept Amendment 57, which seems to me the least that we can do in an environment where we are, in effect, making a promise to students. If it turns out that, for good reasons, that promise cannot be kept, they ought to be looked after.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I have spoken before in this context as chancellor of the University of Birmingham, chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School and an alumnus of Harvard Business School. However, years ago, when I was qualifying as a chartered accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, I spent a year at what is now the London Metropolitan University, where I would later spend time as a visiting professor. I want to draw an analogy. In 2012, the London Metropolitan University lost its right to recruit international students. At that time there were 2,700 international students with valid visas, who had come here in good faith. They were given 60 days to find a place at another institution. That not only jeopardised their lives and futures but jeopardised and placed in crisis an institution with 30,000 students and 2,000 staff. That has implications for not only the institution but international students—as I know as the president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs.

Today, Universities UK has released a report showing that there are almost 450,000 students in the UK, of which almost 130,000 are from the European Union. The contribution they make to the British economy in gross terms—what they spend directly and indirectly— is £25 billion. With Brexit coming up, the uncertainty for international students, let alone EU students, is already there. It is not right that they have the added uncertainty that if, for whatever reason, the institution they join fails, they will be left high and dry. It will affect our economy and our ability to recruit international students. As it is, we have immigration rules that are against international students, which we will talk about later on Report.

I urge the Government to take this measure very seriously. It will give security to our domestic students and it is important for our international students and our reputation around the world.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I did not intend to speak on this issue but I want briefly to say something very important. If any of us had children who we sent off to higher education, we would expect that institution to give them the support and development they needed. There are private colleges that have their courses validated by individual universities. Of course, those private colleges could, under certain circumstances, get into difficulties and cease trading. What happens then to the students and to their student loans? As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, rightly said, we are seeing this already in further education, where training providers are going into liquidation. They are all right—they have gone into liquidation—but the poor student is left high and dry. I hope that when the Minister replies he might give assurances on this matter.

Higher Education and Research Bill

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Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I take note of what the noble Lord has said. I will be saying more about this in a moment. I understand the concerns on this issue. I say again that the Government are not complacent about the concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and others have. We have explicitly committed to consider the ratings and their international impact as part of the lessons learned exercise. Not all providers will be able to get a bronze award. The Government have listened to the concerns raised by this House and noble Lords and I am pleased to announce that the Office for Students will label providers without a quality assessment as, “ineligible for a teaching excellence award” on both the register and in key information for students. Let me be quite clear that this indicates to students, parents and employers that there is a level that sits below bronze.

In contrast, the implication of this amendment is that the vast majority of the sector will end up being labelled wrongly as “meets expectations”—unless the intention is that much of the sector will actually be termed a failure, as in pass or fail. Without clear differentiation it is impossible to tell students where the best teaching can be found. GuildHE and Universities UK wrote to noble Lords last week expressing their support for the Government’s approach. Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter University, said:

“Some of the most controversial aspects of the TEF are … essential to its success. Genuine, clear differentiation is critical if we are truly to incentivise teaching”.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

I thank the Minister for giving way. Will he confirm that when the Government carried out the consultation on the teaching excellence framework, one of the questions asked was: do you agree with the descriptions of the different TEF ratings proposed? Will he also confirm that an overwhelming 55% said no? On the basis of that, the Government came up with the gold, silver and bronze. Now the Minister is hearing unanimously from noble Lords and university leaders that this will not work for universities, will damage the sector and will create the wrong perception. So surely the Government should listen again. If they have listened before, they can listen now.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

We continue to listen, and I have said that we are beefing up our lessons-learned exercise. To come back to the point that the noble Lord raised, it is true that we consulted everybody, and a number of ideas were put forward, including pass and fail and the one to 10 rating. It is not true to say that everyone was against the gold, silver and bronze system. We have come to this decision and think that it is right to go ahead on this basis. It is not just the higher education providers who believe that differentiated assessment is the right methodology. Alex Neill, director of policy and campaigns at Which?, said:

“Our research has shown that students struggle to obtain the information they need to make informed decisions about university choices. We welcome measures to give students more insight into student experience, teaching standards and value for money. These proposals could not only drive up standards, but could also empower students ahead of one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives”.


I know that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, raised student opposition to the TEF—I think that he may have indicated that no students were in favour—but students are not opposed to the principle of differentiation and ratings, which, as he knows, rests at the heart of the TEF. For example, in a survey for Times Higher Education, 84% of university applicants said that a good score in the TEF would definitely make them consider choosing a particular institution. So there is another side to this argument.

Furthermore, without differentiation, there will be no incentive for the vast majority of higher education providers to improve. Retesting whether providers “meet expectations” does nothing to encourage excellence beyond this—

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a former international student and the third generation of my family in India to be educated in this country. I am chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School, which has just been ranked No. 5 in the FT global MBA rankings. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said, our universities are the best in the world along with those of the United States of America.

I wholeheartedly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Patten, is not with us. The amendment refers to more than international students and talks about competition from other countries in terms of collaboration as well. That point should not be missed. I have made the point many times that at the University of Birmingham, where I am proud to be chancellor, when we carry out collaborative research with a university such as Harvard—I am proud to be an alumnus of the Harvard Business School—it has three times the impact of our individual research. Therefore, it is essential that we do that, particularly given the European Union referendum and the potential of Brexit coming up.

There are accusations that international students overstay. Can the Minister confirm that a Home Office report has shown that only 1% to 1.5% of international students overstay? If he will not answer that question, will he say why the Government continually refuse to put in visible exit checks at our borders? If we scanned the passport—EU and non-EU—of every person coming into this country, and the passport of every person—EU and non-EU—going out of this country, we would know who was coming in and who was going out, particularly with regard to international students. I urge the Minister to say why the Government are not doing this.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, the global environment is one in which the international student demand from countries such as India is increasing by 8% year on year. We have no target to increase the number of international students. This amendment very clearly says that the Government need to make that a priority. I go further and say that there should be a target. Countries such as France, for example, have a specific target to double the number of students from India by 2020. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, the number of Indian students went up to nearly 40,000 around 2010. It has now dropped by over 50%. Canada, the United States and Australia all have programmes to increase the number of international students. In fact, Australia has a Minister for international students. Last year in India, the Australian high commissioner said to me, “Thank you for your immigration policy on international students. You’re sending them to us instead”. That is ridiculous.

We now face competition from European Union countries. Non-English speaking countries such as Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands—I have already mentioned France—are incentivising international students. Why cannot we accept this amendment once and for all to make international students a priority? Given the backdrop of Brexit, that is even more important. A survey last year said that 82% of EU students and 35% of non-EU students reported that they would find the UK less attractive as a result of Brexit. This means that some 50,000 EU students and 63,000 non-EU students could be at risk. The proof of the pudding comes from the latest indication that fewer EU students have applied to start university courses in the UK. According to UCAS, there was a 9% fall in the number who had applied for courses. At Cambridge, we know that the figure has dropped by 14%.

I am also president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which represents the 450,000 international students in this country, of whom 130,000 are from the EU. UKCISA’s response to the EU referendum result was very clear. It said that it sends,

“worrying signals to thousands of EU (and indeed British students hoping to participate in EU mobility programmes) but given the government’s relentless pressure to cut net migration (including curbs on international students) it is … not surprising that this has been the result”.

I am co-chair, along with Paul Blomfield in the House of Commons, of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Students. Our purpose is to recognise the global prominence of UK education, to promote the value of international students, to promote, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said, the soft power of international students, to raise awareness of issues that affect international students and, in reference to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hannay, to provide a platform for collaboration.

Before I conclude, perhaps I may give a specific example. Following the Committee stage, last week at the University of Birmingham I chaired the annual meeting of our annual court, at which we highlighted that not only one-third of our academics, of whom 18% are from the EU, but a quarter of our students, including from the EU, are international. We have just released an independently prepared impact report on our university. It highlights that:

“Eight additional international undergraduate students would add £1m to the economy”.


That is what we are talking about. It is economic illiteracy not to promote international students and to send out signals that they are not welcome here. At Birmingham, according to this impact report, our international students contribute £160 million to the economy, and they are advocates and ambassadors for Birmingham. They are also ambassadors for the UK around the world, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said.

Just last week—again, since Committee—UUK released a report on international students. It said:

“International students are vital for a successful post-Brexit, industrial strategy fit for a global Britain”.


It also spoke about the element of soft power. At any one time there are 30 world leaders who have been educated at British universities. The report also—this point has not been made so far—spoke about a ComRes public opinion poll for Universities UK which suggests that the public do not view students as immigrants. It said:

“Only 23% of Remain voters and 25% of Leave voters view international students as immigrants. Of those that expressed a view, 75% say they would like to see the same number, or more, of international students in the UK. Of those who expressed a view, 71% would support a policy to help boost growth by increasing overseas students. This polling suggests that current visa policy is not addressing public concerns”.


I would go one step further: this poll suggests that the Government are entirely out of line with public opinion when it comes to international students. I need only mention the current, and first Indian, president of the Royal Society, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan—Nobel laureate and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Universities UK does not argue that students in the UK should not be counted. I do not think that anyone here is saying that; we are saying that they should not be included in a net migration target. Our direct competitors categorise international students as temporary citizens. In the United States they are classified as non-immigrants alongside tourists, business visitors and those in cultural exchange programmes. In Australia they are classified as temporary migrants alongside tourists and visitors, and in Canada they are classified as temporary residents. These are our direct competitors. If they can do it, why cannot we?

Every time this issue has been brought up in this House, there has been unanimous cross-party support for taking international students out of the net migration figures, but the Government are not listening, the Prime Minister is not listening and the Home Office is not listening. So what option do we have? The only option is legislation and I urge noble Lords to support this amendment. Net migration figures create a perception that has unfortunately become reality in putting off international students. They must be a priority for our universities, for our economy, for our position in the world, for our domestic students and, more importantly with this uncertain future, for our whole country.

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, as has been said, Amendment 150 would serve to redress a number of unsatisfactory outcomes. These already threaten to undermine our economic competitiveness, skills, trade, exports; then soft power deriving around the world from our usual reputation for welcome and fair-mindedness. However, adjusting, through this amendment, is perhaps all the more fitting, remaining as we do within the Council of Europe of 47 states, within which affiliation, through good practice such as this amendment promotes, we can therefore continue to assist balance, democracy and common sense.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bhattacharyya (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as declared in the register, and specifically to my chairmanship of WMG at the University of Warwick. I should also mention that I served as a member of Sir Paul Nurse’s review of the UK research and innovation landscape that put all this together.

As peace appears to be breaking out today, I hope that those who laboured for so long in the salt mines of Committee will allow me a few brief words on Amendments 166, 173 and 183. All three will help Innovate UK promote partnerships between business and academia. I can tell your Lordships that that can be a tough job. When I started WMG, we encountered a lot of opposition. Academics are protective of their independence from commerce. However, engineers like making an impact—the bigger, the better—so their curiosity won out in the end.

We know that academic traditions can obstruct business collaboration. For example, grant application writing is a highly prized skill in universities, for a very good reason: critical assessment of research proposals is vital to academic debate. Businesses see this rather differently, especially if they are expected to disclose commercially sensitive knowledge. The Technology Strategy Board was created to address this cultural gap. We debated it here for about four years before it was formed because there were arguments on whether government should intervene and pick winners and many other arguments at that time. But we won and the Technology Strategy Board was created. Of course, this body is now Innovate UK.

Change is constant, so Innovate UK needs leaders who understand the way business and science are changing, as well as the flexibility to create the right partnerships. Amendment 166 would ensure this. Today, every business is multidisciplinary. If you make cars, you need programmers, cryptographers and medical researchers, as well as metallurgists and engineers. Bringing Innovate UK and the research councils under the same roof makes both scientific and commercial sense. Amendments 173 and 183 will ensure both business and scientific knowledge in Innovate UK’s leadership, allowing it to build flexible partnerships with business.

Innovate UK’s role is to act as a catalyst for business collaboration and partnership with academia. However, although flexibility is needed, Innovate UK should not be a bank. It has neither the resources nor the skill set. Instead, it should use its commercial expertise to create incentives to encourage businesses to invest in innovation. Its role is that of a matchmaker, not a moneylender. Its role has to be to improve productivity in this country via scientific research. The amendments in this group will help Innovate UK deliver on that vital task. More generally, the amendments proposed elsewhere today will do the same for UKRI as a whole.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, in relation to Amendment 166, I want to emphasise again the importance of having individuals from a business background because, all too often with these initiatives, the Government have the best of intentions but there are people involved who do not have experience in business and have not run businesses, and it is when you run businesses that you realise that innovation and creativity are at the heart of it. I would go further and say that they must come from science-related business backgrounds. Any good business has to be innovative. In my industry—food and drink—you have to be innovative. But the key issue here is having people with business backgrounds at the top table.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I confirm that we are signed up to Amendment 166 and support the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown. It is important to get the balance right. There is probably another Goldilocks pun there but I am sure the Minister will pick it up and we will get a response to that.

We have also signed up to government Amendments 173 and 183, which are at the heart of the debate we had earlier. Again, this plays to the argument made by the Minister that there are ways of improving the Bill. We have been able to explore them in Committee and now on Report, and it is good to see that there are movements here that have support right round the House, which we are pleased to be part of.

We also feel that more constraints may emerge from the business consideration than have perhaps been allowed to emerge so far. As my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya pointed out, given the genesis of all this through the Technology Strategy Board, and now through Innovate UK, it is important that institutions learn from their history and gain from their experience over time. The formation of UKRI and the involvement of Innovate UK in that was not recommended by Sir Paul Nurse, who just felt that the issue should be looked at. But the Government decided to move forward and it is therefore their responsibility to make sure that we get the most out of it.

My noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya was also at pains to point out that we are talking about the creation not of a bank here but of a ginger group. It is an opportunity to create incentives and a ginger group that moves forward with the support of industry will be much better than one which tries to do it on its own. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I have my name on this amendment. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, for moving it so fully and eloquently, and I entirely agree with everything that he said.

It seems extraordinary, and I thought this at Second Reading, that the research knowledge and capability is at UKRI but—so far as I know, and I will be corrected if I am wrong—there is no requirement of any sort that the Office for Students should have any particular knowledge or experience of research or, for that matter, research degree-awarding powers. Therefore, the decision is to be taken by people who profess no particular knowledge of the subject matter of research degree-awarding powers. That is to be left to a matter of advice. The difficulty with that, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, has pointed out, is that when it comes to accountability all that the Office for Students can say is, “Well, we got this advice from UKRI. That’s our defence”. Surely, the people who should defend the advice that is the essence of the matter should be the people who give it. There is a difference between decision-makers and advisers, as we were authoritatively informed some years ago: Ministers decide, advisers advise. In this context, the decisions are to be taken by the Office for Students while UKRI, with all its expertise, is relegated to being an adviser.

I have interests in the University of Cambridge, in the sense that I am an honorary fellow of two of the Cambridge colleges and I am a member of the Council for the Defence of British Universities. However, my view, which I have expressed consistently since Second Reading, is that UKRI’s research capabilities mean that it should be involved in the decision-making process as a decision-maker, not merely an adviser. As the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, said, we got a letter this morning, which was followed up by an invitation to telephone. Naturally, I accepted the invitation to telephone as soon as I was free to do so. We had a considerable discussion, and I was asked whether the second part of the amendment was as important as the first, the second part being about research students. I said, “Not for me”; I thought the essential part was the first part. I thought, “This sounds good”. Your Lordships will no doubt wait with bated breath to hear what the answer is to that. Anyway, I expressed the view that the second part was not so important. Therefore, if at some stage the amendment is subject to further consideration, I would be perfectly happy—I think this goes for its co-mover as well—to forget about that. The essential part is the decision-making. Surely the Government recognise that there is a difference between a decision-maker—a person with some responsibility for decisions—and an adviser. I strongly support the amendment and feel rather disappointed that the Government have not seen the logic of its position.

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, have said.

I shall read out the mission statement for the University of Cambridge, which is very short:

“The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence”.


That came home to me when I was a student there. We finished the last supervision of term in my favourite subject with a brilliant supervisor, and he said, “Have a good holiday. Now I can get on with my real work, which is research”. That is the importance of research to our top academics.

At the University of Birmingham, where I am chancellor, I chaired the annual meeting earlier this month. We announced that Birmingham had won three more Nobel prizes, taking our total to 11, because of our research.

The University of Cambridge Judge Business School, where I chair the advisory board, has in just over a quarter of a century become fifth in the world in the global FT MBA rankings. One of the main reasons for that is the absolute priority placed on research.

Anything we can do to make sure that we have robust support for our research—not just through advice but taking the expertise of UKRI along with that of the OfS, jointly—would be good for the future of research and the excellence of our universities.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on the energy he has put into this issue during the process of scrutinising the Bill. The debates we have had on it have made it absolutely clear that on all sides of the House we strongly support legitimate overseas students coming to Britain to study, because it enhances the academic experience of British students, it is good for the overseas students, and it is a great British export.

What the Minister said in signalling again that the policy remains to attract legitimate overseas students was rather more welcome than the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, accepted, although I fully realise why he made the observations that he did. He says that statistics are not the crucial issue and statistics are less important than policy. However, the point we heard a moment ago from the Minister about this new exercise on statistics has considerable potential value. Aside from all the general arguments, one of the frustrations about this debate is a genuine empirical disagreement about how many students from abroad overstay in this country. A lot of the debate and attitudes in Whitehall are shaped by a view that we have a problem of a lot of overstayers. If there is such a problem, we need to tighten the regime. If, however, there is not a problem of overstayers, and it can be established authoritatively that there is not, that would be a significant contribution to the debate.

The statistics at the moment are very unreliable. If someone comes here to study and tells someone doing one of the surveys that they are here to study, stays on and works for a time, then leaves, answering the question, “What have you been doing?”, with, “I’ve been working”, they count as a leaving worker, not as a leaving student. If someone comes here to study, thinking that they will be here for more than a year, but end up leaving Britain after being here for 11 months—many master’s courses are advertised as a year long but you can complete them in 11 months—they do not count as one of those one-year students departing. There are lots of problems like this in the statistics, which have proved a bane in the debate about overseas students and their numbers. I very much hope that the important initiative which the Minister announced today, which was discussed in the other House yesterday, will enable us to get to the bottom of those types of empirical questions. That would be an important contribution to the debate, and I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that those type of questions will be within the scope of this exercise and that we will learn more about it.

I also hope, thinking of all the time that we have spent on attracting overseas students to this country, that we might briefly remind the Government of the importance of encouraging British students to study abroad. Of course, dare one say it, if they were to study abroad for more than a year, it would reduce net migration—not that that is the most important reason for promoting it. However, when one looks at half a million students coming from abroad to study in Britain and 30,000 British students going to study abroad, especially if we are to be a dynamic global presence, even post Brexit, we need to do better at promoting and encouraging British students to go abroad. One way to do that is to make it easier for them to take out loans to finance their study abroad. I hope that we will look at that.

Finally, as this will be my last intervention on the Bill, I congratulate the ministerial team that has successfully brought the Bill to a conclusion. My noble friend Lord Younger has been courteous throughout this debate, and Jo Johnson has been extraordinarily diligent in spending time in this Chamber observing our debates. This is a substantial piece of legislation. We legislate on higher education only once a generation, and this legislation finally puts in place a regulatory regime that matches the realities of higher education in Britain. We could not have carried on with the old grant-giving body being a kind of informal regulator, using its power of the purse to regulate the sector. This is a much better, more lucid, more transparent and more rule-based system.

In our debates in this House, on all sides, it has been clear that we care passionately about the autonomy of higher education institutions and universities, and the provisions, including the new ones we have debated today, enhance that autonomy. Looking back on this debate, one of my regrets is that while we have tended to look at this from an English perspective. From the conversations I have with vice-chancellors, it is clear to me where the biggest threats to autonomy in our universities lie, and it is not in England. The relationship between the Scottish Government and their universities is far more intrusive and overbearing than anything that would be acceptable in England. We have sometimes had an English Minister with English teaching responsibilities facing challenges about autonomy for which he is not responsible. I hope that in the future we will be avid in securing, scrutinising and protecting the autonomy of Scottish universities, which matters enormously in Scotland and more widely. Therefore, we have a better regulatory regime, we have spoken up for autonomy, and, significantly, the focus on teaching has reminded us of the importance of the educational experience in university. After so much attention has been given to research over the years, it is excellent that we have spent so much of our time focusing on teaching.

I therefore thank the Ministers, and I thank their Bill team for the way in which it has engaged with many of us as we have had questions to make sense of specific proposals and try to engage with them. Indeed, this has been a cross-party debate. We have had excellent interventions from experts on the Cross Benches, people who work in and understand higher education, which has enormously enhanced our debate. We have heard from the Opposition Benches—I agree that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, made an important contribution from the Opposition Front Bench—and from the Lib Dem Benches. Occasionally I had to remind myself that we had worked on this together in coalition and that some of the measures that were now proving so controversial could trace their origins to a Government in whom there was even a Secretary of State I worked with who belonged to a certain party opposite. However, all parties have worked together on this, and we can be proud of the Bill that is now going forward.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I echo much of what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, but I want to start with the reference that the Prime Minister made to the “unelected House of Lords” when she announced the election. This unelected House is at its best when it does what it has done with this Bill. It is probably one of the most amended Bills in the history of Parliament, with more than 500 amendments, and that is because of the expertise that exists across the board in this House—a breadth and depth of expertise that no other Chamber in the world comes anywhere close to by a factor of maybe 10. A former Universities Minister has just spoken and we have heard from chancellors and vice-chancellors of universities, former vice-chancellors of universities such as Cambridge and the heads of Oxbridge colleges—and I could go on. Where in the world would you get that? We have had it with this Bill.

I thank the Minister, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for having always been polite and decent, and for having listened. We may not be where a lot of us want to be, but the Government have listened and there has been a lot of movement. I, too, acknowledge the commitment of the Minister, Jo Johnson. I have never seen a Minister so assiduous in attending the stages of a Bill in the way that he has with this one, and it shows visibly that he is listening. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for the initiative that he has taken on this amendment. He is a former pro-chancellor of the University of Birmingham, where today I am proud to be chancellor.

Normally, you are not meant to repeat things at various stages of a Bill—you cannot make another Second Reading speech later on. However, in this case new information and new reports have been coming out at every stage. For example, the UUK report suddenly revealed that the contribution of international students is much higher than we had ever thought. Figures of £13 billion or £14 billion were quoted, but the figure is actually £26 billion a year. That is new information to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was trying to do with this amendment. On top of that, we have had, hot off the press, the Education Committee’s report entitled Exiting the EU: Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education, dated 25 April.

Before I go any further, there is a unanimous consensus around the country—let alone in this House, where we won this amendment by close to 100 votes—that international students should not be included in the net migration figures. The National Union of Students has stated:

“We are concerned that—as long as international students are included within net migration statistics—policies that adversely impact international students owing to the Government’s desire to reduce levels of immigration will only exacerbate”.


It also said:

“The Government’s abject failure to offer anything substantial on removing international students from net migration targets is”,


in its words,

“outrageous. There is immense support for doing so, from cross-party parliamentarians, from UK students and from the general public. It is unacceptable that the government continues to ignore this support”.

I come to the House of Commons Education Committee’s report, which no one has spoken about and which has just been published—on 25 April. It contains a whole section on international students and the migration target. It says very clearly that the 100,000 target still exists, yet we all know that the latest figure for overall net migration is 273,000. The excuse that the Government give every time we challenge them to remove international students from the net migration figures is that the UN rules mean that we have to include them and treat them as immigrants—and those are indeed the UN rules.

The Government’s other answer is always, “There is no cap on the number of international students. Any number is welcome”. However, the danger lies in the perception that is created by continuing to include them in the figure and treat them as immigrants. The Home Secretary at the Conservative Party conference spoke about possibly reducing the number of international students. That is scary—and it is a message that goes to the outside world. The Commons Education Committee said the majority of its written evidence and witnesses at its meetings were very clear that international students should be removed from the net migration target, which would,

“help offset risks to higher education from leaving the EU”.

It continued:

“Our evidence was unanimous in saying that international students were a positive force”,


for education, contributing £25.8 billion a year and creating more than 200,000 jobs, and contributing to the richness of our universities, as well as to the UK’s soft power.