Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is extremely well worded and very appropriate for the legislation in front of us. I am absolutely convinced that the current Minister responsible for higher education will respect the institutional autonomy of universities, but some future Minister may not. As a former Minister responsible for higher and further education, I was rightly constrained by the 1988 Act and what Lord Jenkins managed to do with his amendment. There were sometimes times when I did not agree with what was happening, but I was unable to interfere, which would have been wholly inappropriate. That is an extremely good thing.

There is a second reason why I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I, along with Jo Ritzen, a very distinguished former Dutch Minister of Higher Education, and two other former European Education Ministers—Eduardo Grilo from Portugal and the former Hungarian Education Minister—embarked on a project led by Jo Ritzen entitled Empower European Universities. It looked at the position of universities across Europe—north, south, east and west—in particular at some of the problems some universities in eastern Europe experience, as in southern Europe. There was an incredible amount of state control over what these institutions could do. One of the outcomes of that is you get no innovation. Therefore, one of the reasons why we should promote autonomy in our higher education institutions is that we should be concerned to make sure universities do not stand still, that they take into account a changed environment and that they are innovative. By being autonomous they are far more likely to be innovative than if they are controlled by Governments, as we saw from the project we did across Europe.

[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.