Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, my remarks will focus on some concerns about UKRI. I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University and as having been both a member and a grantee of research councils.

The Minister’s positive rhetoric about research and innovation is of course welcome, and a “strong voice” in Whitehall for these sectors must indeed be restored. Ministers need external advice on how to apportion funding between different councils, on the balance between responsive mode grants and strategic and regional initiatives, and of course on how to cope with Brexit.

It would have been widely welcomed if the old Advisory Board for the Research Councils had been revived in some form—again headed by a respected and experienced figure but perhaps this time with a stronger and broader membership than that body had. In a sense, the Government have done that. The “top layer” of the proposed UKRI—its chairman, CEO, and board—has essentially those features. Many of us wish that the Government had stopped there, leaving the research councils and Innovate UK with their present status. However, the Bill proposes to merge them—even the century-old MRC with its distinguished history and culture—into a new conglomerate. In so doing it would downgrade the existing research councils—their heads, and their councils—with their diverse networks and expertise, by imposing an extra layer of authority above them, and would concentrate power in a single chief executive.

Among the motivations for UKRI have been two things. First, a McKinsey report suggested that there were too many independent cost centres under BIS. Secondly, undertaken at George Osborne’s request, Sir Paul Nurse’s report—which, incidentally, he wrote as an individual, not representing the Royal Society—advocates a merger of research councils. It is an old idea, but it seems to have become a sacred text—in respect of which I am proud to be a heretic, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave.

To combine them all into one looks administratively neat but has little more justification than, for instance, DCMS putting all of London’s museums under a single executive super-director. UKRI’s yet-to-be-appointed chief executive would not only advise on science policy, apportionment of funds between councils, strategic initiatives, and so on—a job that I have already emphasised is needed—but he or she would also be the line manager and accounting officer for nine complex and disparate organisations. To take an analogy from the United States, it seems like putting the NSF, NIH, DARPA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities under a single “supremo”. UKRI would oversee as large a fraction of this country’s publicly funded research as those four bodies, added together, do in the US. It is not just a UK analogue of the NSF, as has sometimes been claimed.

If UKRI is set up as proposed, the UK’s efforts in humanities, big and small sciences, medicine, engineering and innovation will all depend on the leadership within this one conglomerate. Such a concentration of authority surely introduces too great a risk of single-point failure. The message from many speakers suggests that in this context, as in others, subsidiarity and diversity will be more prudent than the proposed reforms.

Moreover, even those who think that UKRI’s structure could offer net long-term benefits might deem this a bad time to set it up. It has already been stated that this reorganisation will not come into full effect until April 2018, and its fall-out could drag on longer. This upheaval is surely the last thing we need at a time when universities and the high-tech community have to contend with so many issues that need top-priority attention—not least, the ones threatened in the other parts of the Bill.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I support these amendments, in particular for the reasons stated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, regarding mature learners. However, there are of course many other reasons to expect that part-time learning will be a larger part of the higher education system in future. One other reason is distance learning—so-called MOOCs, and so on—which will have an important role in vocational training, as they stand alone and can be done well by mature, motivated students. However, I also emphasise that part-time learning is essential if you want to have greater open opportunity.

One of the bad features of present higher education is that if someone has been unlucky in their early education, having gone to a poor sixth form or having had family problems, they will not get over the bar at age 18 for admission to a strong university and a strong course. In the present system they do not have a very good second chance. It needs to be made easier for them to do part-time learning—at the Open University and so on—and to gain credits, so that they can qualify for admission to a university on the basis of credits accumulated perhaps elsewhere.

This is something we can learn from the University of California system, in which only a proportion of those who are at Berkeley come straight from high school. Many come through junior college or part-time learning. We need to open up and make things more flexible, which is just another of the ways in which part-time learning will be of growing importance. That is why it is crucial that it should not be in any sense regarded as an afterthought tacked on to the main part of the Bill, and why it is welcome that these amendments will increase the prominence and the dimensions of part-time and lifelong learning in this clause.

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and will elaborate on what I said at Second Reading about the likely impact of the digital revolution on higher education, which will potentially be absolutely fundamental and possibly as great as it has been in any other area of society and the economy.

Traditionally, part-time and distance learning have been seen as a kind of adjunct to “proper” university education, which is full-time and campus-based. That separation is likely to break down more and more radically, and in the near future rather than the distant one. Indeed, the whole structure of higher education could become fundamentally transformed. Somebody must track these trends and try to work out their implications.

In the US, 4 million undergraduates in 2016 took at least one course online—one-quarter of the total undergraduate body, and that is expected to grow to one-half within the next five years. It has been said—Americans have a way with words—that this has produced “bricks for the rich and clicks for the poor”. However, if that division is a fundamental one, it is rapidly dissolving, as digital learning increasingly becomes part of the day-to-day experience in the top-level universities.

Something huge is going on here; it is “don’t know” territory, but it will be radical. Can the Minister say how, in this Bill, the Government propose to track these trends and work out their implications for students, many of whom pay £50,000 for an experience which may become to some extent obsolete? We do not know how far the campus-based university will survive, but it will be radically transformed.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brown of Cambridge]

My Lords, we have heard about the importance of international students in the context of soft power and global Britain. I want to talk about the importance of international students from my perspective as an engineer. They are crucial to the delivery of our industrial strategy and to the UK being able to develop the STEM skills that it will need to deliver that strategy.

When I was principal of the engineering faculty at Imperial College, many of my engineering courses had more than 50% overseas students. Those students were not taking the places of UK students; they were providing the additional fee income that enabled Imperial College to provide the outstanding facilities to train UK students in key engineering disciplines. Some of those courses would not have been sustainable without the income from our overseas students. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has highlighted to us a number of times that universities have used additional funding that they now get for arts students in order to subsidise the high-cost subjects.

An outstanding institution such as Cranfield, for example, relies on overseas students to run the wide range of industry-focused Master’s programmes that are of huge benefit to UK industry. Again, those programmes would not be sustainable without the higher levels of overseas student fees that they can charge. These overseas students are critical to enabling us to maintain the quality of engineering education in our universities that will enable us to ensure that UK students can develop the STEM skills that we will need in future.

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment. I do not have much to add to the eloquent comments that have been made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and other speakers. I would like to express bafflement that we are still banging on about this issue, which surely has been a compelling argument for more than two years. In the time of the coalition there was already discussion about this but the Government resisted, although there was clearly support for this within BIS.

It is clear that what is happening is an own goal in a number of ways. We need these students in our universities for academic reasons, to sustain specialised courses, to maintain academic quality and to make friends in the long term. It is a matter of perception as well as reality. The reason why the numbers from India plummeted more than from China was that the Indian press were able to present the message that students were not welcome any more in the UK. So perception is very important. We will lose a great deal of soft power in the long run if we maintain this perception. The present Government’s policy is baffling, not only to many of us on the Cross Benches, but to many people within the Government and on the Conservative Benches. George Osborne expressed concern about this, and other Ministers have too.

There is the separate issue of whether we should be more liberal in allowing graduates with talent to stay in this country. Our policy has been strongly attacked by James Dyson, one of our leading entrepreneurs, who presented a report for the Conservative Government.

On all these grounds, I support this amendment and renew my bafflement that it is—at least up till now—meeting so much resistance from the Government. I hope that there will be a change of view and a realisation that it is an own goal to sustain this policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, in at least one of the universities in which I am involved, I know of a specific example where a very able and impressive member of staff was offered, and encouraged to take, a promotion in the department but turned it down because he and his family had come to the conclusion that the UK was not a place where they saw their future.

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, I fully endorse the amendment and the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Patten. I am from a different university but it has entirely similar concerns. I work in a small department where all of the last five faculty appointments were of people from outside the UK. Crucially, we depend upon being attractive to these people but it has been much harder to persuade them to accept positions post Brexit, because not only is there uncertainty about their future employment but they will almost certainly risk losing the freedom for their family to come here in the post-Brexit era. Therefore, we have the same concerns of many other segments of society.

One has only to imagine a young academic from, say, India, Singapore or China deciding which country they wish to work in. It is clear that the attraction of the UK compared with other countries has been greatly diminished by recent events and, unless we can send a signal to counter those trends, we will lose out in the long run. I note that the Government promised some special treatment for bankers; I think that, equally, they should provide it for other skilled occupations, including academics.

I want to make one further remark. Of the last six presidents of the Royal Society, three were born outside this country. We have had a great tradition of attracting to this country scientists who have made their careers here because of the appeal of our universities and our scientific excellence. All that is in jeopardy if we do not pay regard to the concerns expressed in connection with this amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I hope that in the course of this Bill we will make an amendment somewhere in this area or in that of the previous amendment, and I think that we will have to consider carefully what that amendment is. We know that we will be up against a tough negotiator who, in the case of Brexit, has said that no deal is preferable to a bad deal. Unless we can steel ourselves to that level, we will not get our way.