Higher Education

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for securing this debate and for his thoughtful comments.

I look back with affection to those heady days of the 1980s and 1990s when the higher education sector in general and the university sector in particular were going through a period of transition and growth—the establishment of new universities and the evolution of polytechnics to university status—although before that the Wilson Government had formed the Open University, which was a pioneering world first. It gave students of any age, background or, indeed, geographical location the chance to study for a degree. Its partnership with the BBC was quite unique.

We saw in the late 1990s how universities released their validating powers and other institutions became stand-alone colleges and/or universities. The higher education sector blossomed and flourished. In my own city, the University of Liverpool was joined by Liverpool John Moores University, and then Hope, Europe’s first and only ecumenical university, was established—joining together two former Roman Catholic colleges and an Anglican teacher training college. More recently, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Paul McCartney’s and John Lennon’s former grammar school, has become a performing arts higher education college.

The universities complement each other, as they have worked together on many collaborative projects. The old notion of town and gown is very much still alive in Liverpool; for example, in working together with Liverpool City Council on a science park.

Britain is home to 137 Nobel Prize winners, second only to the United States, a fact that should be of great pride to us all. We are a land of academic progress and innovation. Our physicists pioneered atomic and nuclear physics and our economists designed the liberal world that we live in. Today our universities keep producing world-class, ground-breaking research that shapes our country and our world. Research briefings and research papers of our doctors and professors have inspired policy at the United Nations, the White House and the European Commission, as well as leading innovation in some of the largest global corporations, in the fields of engineering, information technology, artificial intelligence, medicine and much more. But the impact of research carried out in our universities is not limited to the grandest history-shaping excellences. For every history-shaping innovation, there will be millions of attempts by dedicated students and individuals contributing each day to moving the frontier of knowledge one step ahead. These are the students and people we need to support as, without them, there would be no innovation.

But what now? Student fees have not gone up in eight years, and costs have doubled. Student numbers are down, and some universities are facing recruitment problems, as we have heard. Universities are facing severe financial difficulties. Staff salaries have declined, and the brightest and the best are regularly poached from overseas, particularly by universities in the USA. Many staff are now appointed only on fixed-term contracts—try getting a mortgage when you are on a fixed-term contract. Like all of us, universities have been harshly hit by the pandemic and the recent higher costs of living crisis. Universities reporting year-on-year deficits jumped by 5% from 2015-16 to 32% in 2019-20, according to Universities UK.

We need to financially support our universities to keep producing the high-level research that we pride ourselves on and to keep leading in the world of innovation. The plummeting value of domestic tuition fees is forcing universities to rely more and more on overseas students—that is a good thing, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, but they are increasingly hard to recruit. We need to recognise that foreign universities have increased competitiveness and are gaining in popularity. Europeans were once charged domestic fees in UK universities. Now, facing triple the yearly tuition fees, most of them are diverting to new destinations, with the Netherlands scoring highest. Others are finding US universities better value for money, as fees in American colleges have almost come to match tuition fees in the UK.

All this is not to say that our universities are perfect. They always need to support and value the best staff, and the staff always need to put the best interests of the students first. As a society, we need more than ever to have high-level skills, to support our higher education sector and to see a new renaissance in learning and research.