Office for Students: Appointments

Lord Cunningham of Felling Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, there is no imposition of a candidate into this particular position. The current make-up of the Office for Students is a broad church. It is a broad range of people, which is what we set out to do in the first place. On the noble Lord’s question: no, we did not know about the obnoxious tweets that came out. That is why I said at the outset that we need to do better. With 50,000 tweets, some of which were completely obnoxious, this is something that we should have known about. We need to learn lessons from this.

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords, since the Minister has recognised that there was a process in these appointments, it follows that there must be a record of those who were involved in it. Will he tell the House, other than the Minister directly responsible, which other Ministers were involved in the process, either formally on the record or informally?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The due process was gone through. The launch was made in July and after the advertisements were laid they were closed in August. Ultimately, the Secretary of State is responsible for appointments, so the process went through. I will also say—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, as well— that Mr Young was appointed on merit, on what he had done. That is very separate from the obnoxious tweets that we know about.