Higher Education: Funding

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

This is very important to us; I support the noble Lord on it. We all agree that widening participation is very important. We are clear about the importance of promoting fair access and widening participation in higher education. We are clear that the brightest and best must have access to higher education irrespective of family income and in those universities where, as the noble Lord described, they have difficulties at the moment. We hope that as you give evidence to us, we hear these problems explained further and better and we know what we have after the spending agreement, we will then be able to start moving forward.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chancellor of the University of Essex. My question is about consultation. Before asking it, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and his team for producing this report. I pity the Minister and, indeed, the Government for having to contend with what is on any reckoning the most complex set of issues and counter-issues. It is gratifying to have the sense of the House that this will not become a political football. My question is this: public confidence in consultation is very low, so will the Minister give an absolute assurance that consultation on the set of issues we have to confront here will take as long as it takes and that every single one of our 130 or so universities will be individually consulted and that they, in turn, will consult inter alia with student unions and their staffs? Without that, frankly, we will not get the best outcome and we will not assuage public anxiety as we must.

[Baroness Wilcox]

I thank my noble friend Lord Phillips for that question about consultation taking as long as it should take and making sure that all universities and student unions are included in all the conversations. That will be the case. We will consult with all the facts before us. This has been a slow start for us as a Government, and I know that people are getting short-tempered with the lack of progress. We feel it. We would like to move ahead further than we have been able to do so far. The comprehensive spending review will allow us, at last, to see what the news is and to move forward from that. I am part of a coalition Government, and I can tell the House that over the past six months we have learnt to do consultation. We are doing better for it. I may not be able to produce the important answers to some of the very important questions that have been asked today, but I hope that the consultation process will bring about the thing that we all want: good education and good universities for our children, to give them the best.