Scotland Bill

Lord Vallance of Tummel Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I will speak briefly. It is no secret that I am most unhappy with the fact that we are continuing with this Bill when it has been so comprehensively overtaken by events. There is a sense that “We’ve started so we’ll finish”. Partly because it has had the gestation period of an elephant, we seem to be debating it at a time when the whole constitutional discussion in Scotland has moved on.

I regret to say that it seems that the business managers of the House share my view of the Bill. I can think of no other reason for the way that it has been treated, and indeed the way that those noble Members who have taken an intense interest in it have been treated, in the course of its process. When I first went to the other place I complained that Scottish legislation was usually done after everyone else had gone home to bed. It seems as though that procedure is now being copied in this House.

However, we can redeem the situation by getting one issue up and live in the debate. There are no two ways about it: what has happened with tuition fees for students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland is so unfair as to shame all of us Scots who have benefited from a Scottish education. Perhaps it needs those of us who have a clear and distinct Scottish accent to say so.

I have not been lobbied by vice-chancellors. That could be because I was a Scottish Education Minister, and maybe they are feart. However, even if I had been I would still take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, that it is important to seize an opportunity now to resolve this matter. There is a sound educational argument for ensuring that we continue to have the maximum number possible of English, Welsh and Northern Irish students in our universities. One of the secrets of a good Scottish education is the nature of the diversity of the experience. That is being denied.

I will make one other point briefly, because I am conscious of the time. Rich English students can continue to come to Scottish universities, either because their parents can afford to pay the fees or because they own an island or a hunting estate or a lovely Georgian house in Edinburgh and so can easily establish residency. Someone who, like me, is a bus driver’s daughter, frankly has no chance whatever.

I will make an appeal to the noble and learned Lord, whom I do not blame for one minute for the difficulties that have been encountered in passing this Bill—if ever there was a Minister who ended up with the short straw, it is the noble and learned Lord. I appeal to him to take this back, having listened to the representations made tonight and in other places, and seek a resolution to this manifest unfairness that—I repeat—shames Scotland.

[Lord Vallance of Tummel]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which as a higher education institution would be directly affected by the amendment if it were agreed. I will not take up much of your Lordships’ time, but I feel that I should draw attention to the chaotic practical consequences that the amendment would have on the Scottish universities and other higher education institutions, which have been levying modest fixed fees on students resident elsewhere in the UK, without controversy, since 2001, in part to manage the flow of students into Scotland.

The decision made here in London to introduce market-based, variable fees up to £9,000 per annum in English, Welsh and Northern Irish universities, changed the game radically. It demanded a response if there were not to be a veritable tsunami of applications from students south of the border for far less expensive places at Scottish universities, with clear consequences for potential students resident in Scotland, and for funding by the Scottish Government. That Government’s decision, on which I pass no judgment one way or the other, was to withdraw funding for students resident elsewhere in the UK, and to allow the Scottish universities to apply the same market-based, variable-fee regime for such students as they would have enjoyed, if that is the right word, had they stayed at home.

Some, including Universities Scotland—the representative body for all the higher education institutions—would say that that was entirely reasonable in a UK context. However, it is also anomalous, particularly as regards the rest of the European Union. However, anomalies of one kind or another are almost inevitable in areas where competence has been devolved to Scotland. Various practical problems stemming from the legitimate pursuit of widely different policies on either side of the border will have to be addressed. In the case of higher education, the EU requirement to give preferential treatment to students resident elsewhere in Europe, as against those from other foreign countries, simply compounds the anomaly.

The substantive issue is how best to deal with such anomalies. The amendment, although on the face of it eminently reasonable in seeking to give European Union benchmarks pride of place, would not only unnecessarily and indefinitely constrain the scope for manoeuvre here in the United Kingdom but would create a major and immediate practical problem for Scottish Universities, for the simple reason that the new fee regime has already been implemented, as we have already learnt.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Surely Amendment 59 deals with the problem that the noble Lord outlined.

[Lord Vallance of Tummel]

I am coming to that. For the next academic year and for the years beyond, places have already been offered to and readily accepted by students who are resident south of the border. Bursary and scholarship arrangements have been substantially modified to help them. Indeed, the financial basis and plans of Scottish universities for the years ahead are dependent on those arrangements, which, as of today, are quite legitimate under the provisions of the Scotland Act 1998. I appreciate the willingness of my noble friend Lord Forsyth to delay implementation, but the question is for how long. A year is simply not long enough.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

If the Scottish Government had their way and Scotland became independent, they would have to do this anyway. Given that we are going to have a referendum on independence, does the noble Lord not accept that the uncertainty arises from the Scottish Government’s own policy?

[Lord Vallance of Tummel]

I share entirely my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s willingness and desire to keep the United Kingdom united. We should not discuss here the circumstances of a hypothesis in which we are no longer a United Kingdom.

To alter the provisions of the 1998 Act now would outlaw arrangements already in place and would throw into considerable disarray the Scottish universities’ administrative and financial arrangements not just for the next academic year but for succeeding years as well. I cannot imagine that this is an outcome that your Lordships would wish to endorse.

Rather than constraining ourselves through legislation that prays in aid European Union regulation, and in so doing simply shifts the locus of the problem within the UK, we should surely retain as much scope as we can to sort out United Kingdom issues in a UK context and to find practical measures between good neighbours for dealing with the problems thrown up by the inevitable anomalies that flow from devolution—as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said.

I will paraphrase the remarks of the Abbess of Crewe in Muriel Spark’s novel of the same name. A problem you solve; an anomaly you live with.

[Lord Morgan]

I intervene very briefly, not as a member of the Labour Party but as a former vice-chancellor. The present situation is deeply harmful to the very concept of a university. Universities are founded on the ethic of equality, whereby all students should be treated the same. We have legislation to deal with some of the more harmful aspects of discrimination—with regard to racial matters, for example—but the current situation is a fundamental breach of that principle. The situation is harmful in two respects. There is a divisive principle at work, whereby students doing the same work in the same institution are not treated the same.

[Lord Vallance of Tummel]

Such divisiveness already occurs as regards international students. The only foreign students who are treated differently are other European Union students.