Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

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

Moved by

[Lord Lipsey]

3: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out “Office for Students” and insert “Office for Higher Education”

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I chair Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, which is part of the university sector. I feel, rising at this stage, a bit like an actor rising to play the porter in “Macbeth”. There have been hours of drama and extraordinary debate about matters of deep principle. I have to make a speech, if I can, that at the same time is amusing but makes a serious point. I am supposed to do it when three-quarters drunk. Unfortunately, I am not three-quarters drunk—there was not time during the dinner break to get that way—so I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I try to square this circle as the porter did.

A well-reputed blog of the higher education sector called, even more peculiarly than the office, Wonkhe, this morning said that there was no chance that the House of Lords would accept this amendment because the resulting body would be called OfHE. I must say that I thought that that was quite a strong argument for the name that I was proposing because “offie” is somewhere you really want to go down to—“go and buy a bottle from the offie”—whereas going for a meeting at the Office for Students sounds extraordinarily tedious and dull. However, it is not on that that I am relying in going for a change of name.

I say “going for a change of name” because I am not convinced that the name that I propose is in every regard absolutely perfect. It could be said that there are many things in higher education that lie outside the field of the OfS and there are certainly some things that lie within it—so I do not guarantee that the alternative that I proffer this evening, Office for Higher Education, is absolutely perfect. All I would say is that it is a great deal more perfect than the option that the Government have presented us with: OfS. I have no idea where “OfS” came from. I envisage in my “Yes Minister” mind a meeting with a special adviser there who said, “Yes, Minister, we could call it anything you like, but we did jolly badly in those university towns at the last election. OfS, so we appear to be on the side of students, would be a good title”—and these things tend to stick.

But the name is clearly inappropriate because much of what it is planned that OfS shall do has very little to do with students. Is registering universities a job for the OfS? Is removing the title from certain universities done in the interest of students? Is fee setting done in the interest of students? Actually, if you come to think of it, the strongest opponents of the Bill have been students, who are now trying to engineer a revolt against the teaching excellence framework. So if we must use this sort of title, perhaps it would be better to call it the Office against Students—which is the effect that I expect this Bill to have; I expect it not to be a successful Bill from the point of view of furthering the student interest.

More seriously, we have to be very careful before importing into our legislation titles which serve a propaganda purpose—who can be against OfS, against students or, in America, against patriots? Before long, we find that the whole of political language has ceased to be neutral in legislation and is starting to slip off into a language from the post-truth era where the titles of things no longer represent their reality but rather a sort of Orwellian other world in which things no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. Such propaganda reasons are not good reasons for the title of an institution.

At this time of night I do not want to detain the Committee further; this is a probing amendment to see whether the Government are at all interested in finding a better name. In the meantime, I will offer unconditionally to any Member of the House who can come up with a better title than I have—Office for Higher Education—a bottle of champagne, provided they can at the same time convince the Minister to accept it. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am a student activist in these things. If we are going to change the title, let us just call it OFFS. That is a suitable acronym. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, knows it well. His would be “Ofhed”, and I think the Minister would be that if he accepted the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, before I start, the Committee might be relieved to hear that my contribution will be somewhat shorter than previous contributions were. I start off, though, by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for his contribution to this short debate. I know how personally committed he is to ensuring that our higher education system is delivering for current and future students, and I value his insight.

This Bill sets out a series of higher education reforms which will improve quality and choice for students, encourage competition and allow for consistent and fair oversight of the sector. To keep pace with the significant change we have seen in the system over the past 25 years, where it is now students who fund their studies, we need a higher education regulator that is focused on protecting students’ interests, promoting fair access and ensuring value for money for their investment in higher education. I hope that noble Lords will recognise that the creation of the Office for Students is key to these principles. The OfS will, for the first time, have a statutory duty focused on the interests of students when using the range of powers given to it by the Bill. As Professor Quintin McKellar, vice-chancellor of the University of Hertfordshire, said in his evidence in the other place,

“the Government’s idea to have an office for students that would primarily be interested in student wellbeing and the student experience is a good thing”.—[Official Report, Commons, Higher Education and Research Bill Committee, 6/9/16; col. 22.]

It is our view that changing the name of the organisation to the “Office for Higher Education” rather implies that the market regulator is an organisation that will answer to higher education providers alone rather than one which is focused on the needs of students. That goes against what we are trying to achieve through these reforms. Our intention to put the student interest at the heart of our regulatory approach to higher education goes beyond just putting it in the title of the body. The Government are committed to a strong student voice on the board of the OfS, and that is why we put forward an amendment in the other place to ensure that at least one of the ordinary members must have experience of representing or promoting the interests of students.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, mentioned that she thought that students were opposed to these reforms that we are bringing forward. I would like to put a bit more balance to that, because there is a wide range of student views about the reforms. There is some strong support for elements of the reforms as well as, I admit, some more publicised criticism—for example, supporting improvement in teaching quality and introducing alternative funding products for students. As I have already mentioned, we made that change at Report stage to make sure that there is greater student representation on the OfS.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, raised a point about the role of the CMA. To reassure him, we will set out more detail later in Committee about the relationship between the OfS and the CMA.

As a regulator, the OfS will build some level of relationship with every registered provider, and one of its duties will be to monitor and report on the financial sustainability of certain registered providers. However, this does not change the fact that the new market regulator should have students at its heart, and we therefore believe that the name of the organisation needs to reflect that. For this reason, and with some regret in withdrawing from potentially receiving the bottle of champagne, I respectfully ask the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply, but I have to say that if we are going to go on like this, it is going to be very hard pounding. I have great respect for the Minister, and I know he has the interests of education at heart. All he had to say was that the Government are prepared to consider alternative titles before we come back to this on Report and if we can find one better than OfS, they will be happy to consider it and we would all have gone home—if we can get a taxi—happy. Instead, he defended this with some arguments that I do not feel the force of.

The Minister said that if it was called the “Office for Higher Education” it would mean that it was acting in the interests of higher education providers only. Does Ofgas operate just in the interests of gas providers? Of course it does not. These regulators do not work in that way. “Office for Higher Education” is a wholly neutral term and means that it will be active in the interests of all those involved in every way in higher education and will not be just a representative of a particular group.

Incidentally, the Minister said the OfS would be representing a particular group and would be representing students because it is about fairer access. The whole point is that, at the time when people are trying to access universities, they are not students at all, or at least they are only school pupils. That is a very good object for a body of this kind, but is not one that can be said to be in the interests of students.

I really would ask the Minister to think again between now and Report. If he is not able to do so, we will take the winner of the champagne and put it to a vote on Report. I hope the House will support me, because if things like this become controversial, in a political sense, across the Floor of the House, I am afraid we are going to find the Bill very hard to digest. However, I beg to leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.