Transnational Repression in the UK (JCHR Report)

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of the Free Speech Union. I praise the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the Joint Committee for producing this report and the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, for his brilliant maiden speech. As he knows, I am a big fan because of the work that he has done to promote free speech at the University of Oxford.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned the case of Laura Murphy at Sheffield Hallam University, so I will not dwell on that one. Instead, I will draw your Lordships’ attention to the case of Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor in social sciences at UCL. She was stopped from teaching her long-running data detectives module in 2024 after a Chinese student in her class complained about her use of data about China and its treatment of the Uyghurs from the Global Slavery Index in her module. She wrote in Times Higher Education recently:

“The department made a decision to protect what it saw as a risk to its income owing to potential reputational damage from the student complaint, and the core content teaching how to critically evaluate factual claims and secondary data was removed”.


There is an obvious remedy to these instances of what, on the face of it, looks like transnational repression in Britain’s universities: commence Sections 8 and 9 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Section 9 would create a complaints scheme to enable academics and visiting speakers to complain to the Office for Students if they feel that their right to free speech and their academic freedom have been breached, including by repressive foreign states or at their behest.

The Government have said they want to amend the complaints scheme to exclude students and are waiting for a suitable legislative vehicle they can attach an amendment to containing a revised scheme. But, as I pointed out in this House earlier this week, there is no constitutional reason why this section cannot be partially commenced via a statutory instrument, excluding students from having access to the scheme, even if that is just a stopgap before a scheme meeting all of the Secretary of State’s concerns can be introduced via primary legislation.

We need to introduce a cost-free way for academics to defend themselves, other than by taking ruinously expensive legal action, if their speech rights are breached, including by university leaders worried about jeopardising their income from repressive foreign states. We owe it to Laura Murphy and Michelle Shipworth—and countless others—to introduce this scheme.

Section 8 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act should also be commenced without delay. It would require the Office for Students to monitor higher education providers and students’ unions to assess the extent to which overseas funding presents a risk to free speech and would impose a mandatory reporting requirement for providers to disclose information on foreign funding above a certain amount. The Minister will say that the Government have now created an academic interference reporting route for senior university leaders to pass on concerns about foreign interference to the security services. But while this is a step in the right direction, it is insufficient—and, incidentally, it could be improved by allowing academics to use this route, not just senior university leaders.

As Michelle Shipworth pointed out in her Times Higher Education article, this route is reliant on self-reporting, and senior university leaders may not be aware of inappropriate foreign influence in their institutions. Michael Spence, the president and provost of UCL, is a case in point, as the noble Lord, Lord Moore, just pointed out. Even if they are aware of it, they may be conflicted about reporting it. Under Section 8, all significant foreign income would have to be declared and it would then be the Office for Students’ job to monitor whether that funding came with strings attached.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was voted for by a majority of both Houses of Parliament and received Royal Assent in 2023. For how much longer does the Education Secretary intend to delay activating these clauses? We know there is a problem with transnational repression in our universities, and the Government have the remedy at hand. When are they going to put it in place?