Higher Education White Paper

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, in the debate before this Statement, the noble Lord opposite castigated my right honourable friend Mr Pickles as a Gradgrind figure. We obviously want to be wary of aiming just for value for money, but we have to be very careful to make sure that public money is spent appropriately. I do not think, bearing in mind what I said about preserving academic freedom and the ability of higher education institutions to decide for themselves how to do things, that the approach we are setting out does that in any way at all. We want to make sure that any public money is spent appropriately.

[Lord Lucas]

Does my noble friend agree that the practice of cross-subsidisation must now end? It may have been acceptable, when it was just government money, to take £5,000 from the money provided for a humanities course and give it to a student doing an engineering course. Now, when we are asking a humanities graduate to pay £9,000, it is surely totally unacceptable to take half that money and spend it on an engineering student.

[Lord Henley]

Again, I want to leave this as a matter for the higher education institutions themselves. It is up to them; they do not have to charge the same amount for each student if those students are doing different courses. If students are doing a humanities subject, there is no reason why the institutions should not charge less than for other, more expensive subjects. It must be a matter for them.