Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, I understand the good intentions behind the Bill but I have some doubt that this is the best way to realise them. I hope I will be brief as my good friend, my noble friend Lord Willetts, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, have already made many of the points that I wanted to make, focusing mainly on universities and the world of higher education. I declare my interests as a visiting professor at King’s College London and as chairman of FutureLearn, a digital learning platform.

I would be grateful if the Minister could provide some clarification on three issues. Two of them have been touched on so I will briefly skate over them. The first is the question of the ONS review of the status of universities in the public accounts. This is really not a trivial matter should they be reclassified as part of the public sector. It is important for us to understand, as the Bill makes its way through the House, what assessment the Government have made of the impact on universities’ financial freedoms, including over borrowing and investment, should such a reclassification take place.

The second area on which I would be grateful if the Minister could provide some clarity is the scope of the Bill in relation to how it is going to define a higher education provider. At several points, reference has been made to universities. Universities are of course relatively few in number; there are about 124 of them on the OfS register, along with a further 360-odd higher education institutions that do not have a university title, but beyond that there is a much larger universe of higher education institutions that are not on the register. I wonder what the Government’s intentions are in respect of students studying at those institutions and whether they will be in scope of this legislation.

The third point about which it would be helpful to understand a bit more has been touched on by several noble Lords: the freedom of speech duties that have been strengthened in various bits of legislation over recent years and how those duties will be exercised. In particular, what role will there be for the director for free speech within the Office for Students?

I opened by saying that I did not think this was perhaps the best way of realising the Government’s good intentions. There is possibly a better way, specifically with regard to universities, and that is to focus on developing the positive announcement that the Government made in the Autumn Statement that they would fund training and education relating to anti-Semitism in schools and universities, and to address the problem of anti-Semitism up stream. There are excellent organisations that provide training, including the Holocaust Educational Trust, which could much better be deployed in the cause of addressing the root cause of anti-Semitism in our universities than this legislation. I therefore ask the Government to reflect carefully on whether universities, which by and large are autonomous private organisations, really need to be in the Bill at all.