Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who like Amendment 65, as my noble friend Lord Willetts predicted I would. I join him in saying that I do not share the fears expressed in Amendment 2. To take the example of BPP, which is the company that trained me as an accountant, it has been going a long time. It is the first among equals of a group of companies that have grown up providing professional training services to some very demanding customers. It has therefore developed an ethos of providing very good courses. It also sponsors women’s football, which I am grateful for. It has a broad and very encouraging ethos, which thoroughly justifies its status.

We have to be very careful about the quality of what is provided to students. Noble Lords will no doubt remember Ian Livingstone’s Next Gen report on training for the computer games industry. It found that 85% of courses provided by British universities were not up to scratch. We need to do a lot in the Bill and otherwise to provide students with better information about the quality of their courses, but the people who can demonstrate the best track record in this, who have the best sets of information and who have the most demanding customers are these commercial training companies and those who have come up by that route. We should not be frightened in any way by the fact that they are for profit. Despite that, they have proved that they can provide excellent education.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems absolutely logical that if we believe that the considerations in the amendments before us are vital to the carat gold, the quality and the value of our higher education system, let alone its international standing and reputation, someone somewhere has to have specific responsibility for ensuring that everything done is to protect that role. We have seen in recent weeks a very interesting comparison. Our system of judges came under disgraceful and unprecedented attack in the media. Largely everybody in this House felt that it is a duty of Ministers to protect that system to the hilt. It is therefore absolutely self-evident that, to guarantee that what we want to happen will be protected, the responsibility of the Minister must be spelled out in the Bill.