Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. We need to have a status of title that puts universities and higher education in an elevated place in our society. We know that “students” comes trailing clouds of all sorts of other implications that may not be appropriate. Education and universities are serious, hard-core activities on which this country depends, and they deserve respect.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that the noble Viscount will ask that the amendment be withdrawn, and I can understand why from his point of view—but it does not stand up to scrutiny to maintain that the name of the body should be the Office for Students. In response to my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s amendment in Committee, the noble Viscount said:

“This Bill sets out a series of higher education reforms which will improve quality and choice for students, encourage competition and allow for consistent and fair oversight of the sector”.


Many noble Lords may have doubts about anything other than the second of those objectives, but the noble Viscount was correct to point out that, in introducing the Bill, the Government had those three distinct objectives—so why were they unable to come up with a title that encompassed more than one of them?

The Minister also said in Committee that it was the Government’s intention,

“to put the student interest at the heart of our regulatory approach to higher education”—[Official Report, 9/1/17; cols 1840-41.]—

hence the name. That claim does not withstand close scrutiny. If that had been the case, why did the Bill not contain provision for at least one student on the board of the OfS? Why did it require vigorous argument by the Opposition in Committee in the other place before the Government came up with a rather weak amendment to Schedule 2 providing for the OfS board merely to,

“have regard to the desirability of”,

someone with,

“experience of representing or promoting the interests of individual students”.

It does not provide for such representation; it just says that it is desirable.

In that context, the name “Office for Students” is not without some irony. It is certainly inappropriate because it is a misnomer. If the Minister wants the amendment to be withdrawn, it is incumbent on him and his Government to come up with a name that more accurately reflects the duties that the body is about to assume.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, I appreciate having a further short debate on this matter, but I find it a little ironic how in Committee many noble Lords sought to omit “standards” from the Bill, but now this amendment would add “standards” to it. I would argue that the name relates to the OfS’s core functions and purpose. In response to concerns that the mission of the Office for Students is not sufficiently focused on the interests of students to merit its name, let me assure noble Lords that the Bill places a clear duty on the OfS to consider the interests of students in every aspect of its operations.

The OfS has duties to have regard to the need to promote greater choice and opportunities for students and to encourage competition between higher education providers where this is in the interests of students and employers. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the body should be called the Office for Students—dreary or not—and that its title should signal the fundamental refocusing of the regulatory system towards the student interest which the reforms are intended to bring about.