Higher Education

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, Britain’s universities remain a jewel in our crown. It is enormously to the credit of academics that it is so, considering the headwinds against which they are struggling. They have been casualties of the Government’s chronic mismanagement of the economy, as well as their peculiar unwillingness to invest in education. When you have such precious assets as 25 universities in the world’s top 200, you should treasure them. When your universities are essential for imparting the intellectual skills needed in the workforce of the future, you should invest in them without being paralysed by arbitrary fiscal rules.

Improving skills is one of the Government’s levelling-up missions, yet higher education is only a shadowy presence in the policy. That is bizarre. Universities are major economic presences in their communities and regions. They are important sources of employment. They are partners for business in teaching, research and innovation. They are routes for social mobility and cultural beacons. Without their existence, the plight of post-industrial areas would have been even worse. We cannot claim that universities are the solution to Britain’s productivity problem—productivity remains stubbornly poor—but the productivity challenge is multifaceted, and improving skills is only one part of what is needed.

The Government think they can get away with making students shoulder too much of the cost of the university system. They shifted the weighting of funding substantially from taxpayer-funded grants provided by funding bodies to tuition fees to be repaid by students via the loan system. Then, in 2017, they froze tuition fees for domestic students, which accounted for half the funding of universities, at £9,250. They are still frozen at that level, albeit that since then universities have faced large rises in energy costs, borrowing costs and general inflation. In 2022 the NAO found that the proportion of HE providers with an in-year deficit had increased from 5% in 2015-16 to 32% in 2019-20. The IFS has reported that spending on teaching resources per student was 18% lower in 2022-23 than in 2012-13. We are in an unsustainable situation whereby the level of fees is insufficient to fund tuition in many disciplines, yet it is seen as a poor and even unaffordable deal for many home students.

The unpredictability of the student loan system is a worry for students and for observers of the national finances alike. We know that a significant proportion of loans will not be repaid. Meanwhile, many graduates are experiencing hardship, having subsidised courses other than their own and now, with the interest rate as high as 7%, effectively paying high marginal tax rates over longer periods. I hear increasingly of clever young people who ought to have a university education saying to themselves that the financial implications mean it is not worth while. If the Government are looking for a reasonable concession to the junior doctors and a way to recruit more nurses, they could consider a scheme of loan forgiveness.

The frantic recruitment of international students has been the consequence of freezing tuition fees for domestic students. Although there is great merit in our universities attracting outstanding students from around the world, it is a different matter when they are driven by fiscal pressure to resort to flogging degrees to foreign students, charging shamelessly high fees and, in some instances, debasing academic standards through dubious agency and franchising arrangements. With the changes to the visa rules for dependants this January, the Home Office has made it harder for them to attract international students, and numbers are already tumbling.

Not all the woes of our universities have been visited on them by the Government; some are self-inflicted. Most worrying is the tendency to suppress freedom of speech, and the witch hunts against academics who hold views on, for example, gender issues or the history of empire that are considered by other academics to be heretical. Such attitudes and behaviours are contrary to the proper idea of a university, and feeble academic leadership should not allow them to prevail. Universities should rise higher than the street fascists. If a university is not a place where students and scholars are confident to explore and put forward ideas that may be unfashionable or unpopular, it is not only liberal education that is at risk but liberal society and liberal politics. It also weakens the willingness of the taxpayer to invest in such institutions and the economic and social benefits that they can confer.