Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

This is simply a saving amendment, and I hope that the Minister will say whether it is the Government’s intention to adopt this amendment or to offer one of their own to the same effect on Report in order to ensure that this long-standing, beneficial and, indeed, unique provision is explicitly respected in the Bill. If the Minister is unable to be so definite, perhaps he might be willing to arrange a meeting before Report to discuss how best the necessary provisions can be made.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Norton’s amendment, which would be the ideal. Certainly, we have to move away from where we are in this. I do not find the idea of validation by the OfS satisfactory, with all its conflicts of interest, but universities which set and mark their own degrees are used to that sort of conflict. This sector seems plagued with such conflicts, but I would rather do without them. We have to get to a point where universities acting as validators are not permitted and are in some way controlled by the OfS—if we do not have the arrangement that my noble friend proposes—so that they do not indulge in competitive behaviour in the way that they have in the past. It is an extremely unsatisfactory process at the moment. Validation can last for three years only. That is not in the interests of students. They must have longer-term arrangements with the universities and the universities must be held to them, if that is what we are to go on with.

One can look at examples such as the London College of International Business Studies—a 150 year-old institution, one way and another—which has its degrees validated in Switzerland. It has gone to the altar three times with UK universities, each time being left in the lurch, although it got a QAA pass in the course of one of them. It is now engaged to the Open University and has high hopes of it. I wish it good fortune, but that is not a fair way of asking an organisation to get degree-awarding powers. There has to be good behaviour and consistent behaviour on behalf of the universities.

We also need to solve the problem facing Cordon Bleu. It is an institution operating in 20 countries, awarding degrees in most of them, and extremely highly respected. It cannot come to the UK because, under the validation arrangements currently in place, the validating institution gets a complete licence to use the validatee’s IP to do whatever it wants. Indeed, we have seen one of Cordon Bleu’s competitors pillaged in that way by a UK university. All its IP was taken and used to run that university’s own degrees. That cannot be permitted as a relationship between someone seeking validation and someone offering it.

Whatever we do, we must improve where we are. I am not particularly impressed by what is in the Bill at the moment, but I very much hope that between us we can reach something that will support the entrance of good organisations to degree-awarding in this country in a way that takes account of their quality and the good reasons that they have for thinking they might be allowed to award degrees. However, as others have said, the legislation must absolutely protect the reputation of degrees in this country. We cannot have a situation where substandard organisations get to award degrees.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. It has shone a light in strange places that I did not think we would ever get to. As a not very good Scottish Calvinist, I am probably the least able to contribute to the debates that were organised by my noble friend Lord Murphy and the right reverend Prelate. However, they make good points and I hope the Minister will be able to help to move that debate forward.

I do not like the idea that my noble friend Lord Murphy’s institutions have to act illegally but be forgiven in the courts when they are finally taken account of. We should get ahead of the game and try to sort this out.

We started with the question of how research awards needed to be done jointly between UKRI and the OfS, if that is the body. This is something we will come back to, so it is no disrespect to say that we need not spend too much time on it now, particularly as the principal proposers of Amendment 509 are missing, in one case because of fog and in the other, I think, because of Cambridge. I cannot remember which is which—your Lordships can probably guess. It is therefore probably better if we pick that up when we come back.

That leaves the central issue posed by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, which is how we can find a structure in a system that has institutions of the highest quality by all accounts that can provide the assurance, support and effective answers to any of the questions raised by new challenger institutions, without those challenger institutions feeling that their operations and ways of working will be squished in some sort of force majeure that will be offered by the established club.

The amendments are very interesting. The words that have been used to attack the concept of probationary degrees need nothing further from me; I think that is right. That is not the way the Government should go on this. We are looking at a way of making sure that the quality assessment—the ability to come to an enduring decision about an institution that wishes to seek degree-awarding powers—is done in a way that reflects its ability to fulfil the necessary requirements in terms of capacity, financial security, academic capacity and the rest, but does not interpose somebody else’s view about what the institution should be doing on top of that.

The right reverend Prelate suggested that some of the stuff he was talking about had been going on since 1533. That puts in perspective people’s worries about a four-year period during which tests are made of whether institutions coming into the system are able to cope. Certainly, my discussions, which were mentioned by others, suggested that people who had been through that process found it valuable, so it would be very stupid to throw it away without further consideration.

I went down memory lane with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, because I started my career in academic administration with CNAA. It was bureaucratic and a little heavy-handed but it worked very effectively. It is interesting that the final vestiges of CNAA still exist in the Open University. Maybe that is where we might want to look, as a future amendment suggests, before we start trying to create something that will not stand the test of time or advance higher education in the UK, and may indeed cause problems, many of which have been raised in this short debate.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

305: Clause 46, page 27, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) The OfS may propose conditions on validation arrangements between two registered higher education providers in order to protect the student interest including—(a) referring registered providers to an appointed arbitration panel to resolve disputes related to existing arrangements, and(b) giving guidance to registered providers on existing arrangements.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, when I talked earlier about the need to give the OfS some axis in making sure that validation arrangements work well, this was what I meant. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

That is the second speediest moving of an amendment I have heard so far in Committee. I will be almost as brief, since we have alluded to the fact, if we have not specifically mentioned it, that the answer to a lot of our problems about the validations issue, which will come up in both this and the following group, where there is a clause stand part, and the power of validation of last resort being given to the Office for Students is to pick up the fact that the CNAA, of blessed memory, still exists, in rump form, in the Open University. That is where all its functions and assets were transferred—not that it had very many assets, I am sure—at the time of its dissolution, around the time that the polytechnics were given their degree-awarding powers and we abolished the binary line, effectively. So we have a situation in which it would be possible, I think, to obtain a validator of last resort at very little cost and certainly at no considerable worry in terms of new structures or arrangements. It would certainly resolve one of the issues that is devilling the question of the powers of the OfS, and I very much hope that this amendment will be considered very carefully.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, in view of the very brief comments made by noble Lords in this extremely short debate, I shall also keep my comments short. I am happy to write to noble Lords if they feel that my comments are too short.

I understand that my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment is born of a wish to protect students, but I reassure him that there are already strong protections in place. I also reassure noble Lords once again that on our student protection plans our policy is to ensure that students’ interests are protected if a provider’s validation agreements break down.

I will comment a bit further on providers declining to validate on quality grounds. We expect that the OfS’s commissioning process should be open and transparent, so that providers clearly understand what would be expected of them if they agree to extend their validation services to other registered providers in this way. In all cases we expect the commissioned provider would need to be assured of the quality of the provision that it agrees to validate. The OfS’s commissioning process should therefore allow providers to decline to enter into validation agreements on quality grounds. So we believe that this amendment is not necessary. I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw Amendment 305.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that brief reply. Perhaps he might enlarge on it when we meet, if not in a letter afterwards. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 305 withdrawn.