Higher Education and Research Bill

Mark Field Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The Bill is about ensuring that we have a strong, robust, successful, innovative and high-quality higher education sector for Britain’s young people. The hon. Gentleman sets out problems and then suggests we should not bring forward a Bill to tackle them.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

It strikes me that the Secretary of State is giving a lot of good detail on the safeguards, which should satisfy most reasonable people. Others may feel there is something of a closed shop on degree-awarding powers, and I am very glad that the Bill will, among other things, do its best to break it down. Such a closed shop is unacceptable, particularly in relation to global education provision, which, as she says, we benefit from and can push out to other parts of the world.

[Justine Greening]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. For the many institutions that have spent years working steadily to get their own degree-awarding powers, these changes will be welcome. They should not have to wait so long, and once the Bill is passed, they will not have to do so.

[Mark Field]

I suspect institutions that have spent many years trying to get degree-awarding powers and have not quite got them will feel that they have spent a frustratingly long time doing so. None the less, I am sure this provision will be welcomed in the years to come by many of the institutions she is talking about.

[Justine Greening]

I am sure my right hon. Friend is right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State and welcome her to her position. We look forward to the development of her thoughts on the subject.

The Bill has positive elements, which the Opposition welcome. The recognition and identification of social mobility as a key factor in the expansion of higher education is important. It is crucial that we create a system that works for social mobility not just for young people, but for adults. The introduction of a transparency duty for university admissions will be a good start, but more must be done.

We welcome the promise at last of an alternative student finance method, as pledged in the White Paper. We hope that it addresses the concerns of Muslim students about a lack of sharia-compliant funding. The Opposition had to press the Government hard on that issue during the maintenance grants debate in January, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) has made clear. I am pleased that, finally, it has been taken on board.

I praise the Minister for Universities and Science for his strong and consistent advocacy of the importance that the EU has had for universities in the UK. During the referendum campaign, he spoke trenchantly against Brexit, saying that

“we’re potentially confronted with a funding black hole roughly equivalent to the size of one of our world-class research councils.”

He also said that ditching membership would mean

“losing a seat at the table when the big decisions about funding and priorities are made”.

There’s the rub. The reality is that our world and the education world are utterly changed since 23 June. That makes all the concerns and criticisms that the Opposition and others have voiced on the Bill much more powerful, but we find that the Government are still groping for answers. The Bill too often produces 20th century answers to 21st century challenges. It is laced with an obsession for market-led ideology that does not reflect the realities in higher education or those of the post-Brexit world.

[Mark Field]

As someone who was on the same side of the debate for the 23 June referendum, I recognise the concerns about leaving the EU. However, we must look to the future. There are great opportunities. One of the great things about our higher education system is that it is focused very much on being a global operator, particularly given the strength of the English language. Therefore, there will be tremendous opportunities. It is a difficult, unpredictable and uncertain time, but none the less a time that is open for and ripe with opportunities for our best higher education institutions.

[Mr Marsden]

I welcome what the hon. Gentleman says and the fact that he spoke so staunchly on the part of the remain campaign. The fact remains, as it were, that the Government have not put forward a pathway. I will talk about that later.

Everything one needs to know about that obsession can be found in one small section towards the start of the White Paper, which states that

“we need to confront the possibility of some institutions choosing – or needing – to exit the market. This is a crucial part of a healthy, competitive and well-functioning market, and such exits happen already – although not frequently – in the higher education sector. The Government should not prevent exit as a matter of policy...and it will remain the provider’s decision whether to exit and their responsibility to implement and action any exit plans.”

Such breezy complacency and laissez-faire attitudes would be comical were it not for the dire consequences that they threaten for thousands of students and dozens of research and higher education institutions.

The Government have made great play of their new teaching excellence framework as a way of strengthening HE’s offer to students. The Opposition of course approve of moves to value excellence in teaching—who could not?—and we approve of the concept of measuring teaching quality, but the lack of detail on how it will work is added to by concerns that the Government are using the TEF as a potential Trojan horse for removing the fee cap. If that happens, it could bring in its wake a two-tier system and a very damaging separation between teaching and research institutions.

We are strongly opposed to linking the TEF with fees, as are the majority of higher education institutions’ respondents to the Green Paper, which is why the Secretary of State was so coy in saying that only the best people believe in it. We are strongly opposed because, in the first year, it would allow almost all universities or HE providers to charge an automatic index-linked inflation increase to students. That is particularly problematic post-Brexit, with the fragility of our economy. There are no guarantees on the level of inflation for the next few years. Therefore, students could face significant increases in fees—the Government cannot guarantee otherwise.

In any case, as the White Paper makes clear, all bets are off, because we do not know what further increases will be permitted by the second and third stages of the TEF. The University and College Union and others are deeply concerned by the lack of parliamentary scrutiny built into the TEF. By putting key aspects of the TEF proposals out for consultation separately from the Bill, the Government are denying Parliament the chance to debate the vital aspects of the plan in full. The equality impact assessments the Government have published alongside the Bill raise further questions about the devil in the details of the TEF.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I will try to keep this even shorter, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a great pleasure, as a London MP, to be here with the dynamic duo who have now taken over our education system: my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), who is, unfortunately, not in her place, and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson). Having sat here for the past two hours, I can confirm that he has slightly blonder hair than she does, although I will allow excuses to be made about that. We have another London Member here, the birthday boy, no less: the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). Mysteriously, when I read The Guardian today I saw that it said he was born in 1972 and I was sure that must have been a misprint— he does not look a day over 55 to me. I look forward to hearing his words later on.

At this point, I should make a brief declaration of interest, in that I have spent the past 11 years on the advisory board of the London School of Commerce, which is a private higher education provider.

[Michael Gove]

I am sure the House is delighted to hear that my right hon. Friend is a reader of The Guardian, but may I say that I am glad we do not have mandatory reselection in the Conservative party, because such a confession might not endear him to his constituents, and I very much hope he is here for many years to come?

[Mark Field]

That is very kind. As a vice-chairman of the party, may I say that there might be mandatory reselection in Surrey Heath before too long if we are not careful? I thank my right hon. Friend for the observation. Perhaps this is another Guardian misprint; perhaps that is what the problem has been.

As I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted, my role on the advisory board of the London School of Commerce has been enthralling and interesting. I have watched the development of a private education provider that has dabbled with the idea of having full university status and trying to get degree-awarding powers but has actually expanded overseas. This debate is probably not a great opportunity to talk about the Government’s immigration-related policies, but let me say that I do recognise that they have had an impact on the broader higher education sector; a school that had some 7,500 students coming from abroad only 10 years ago now has about a third of that number. However, one interesting thing has been that this college provides two-year degrees and charges well under the £9,000 limit, and there has been growth in the number of domestic students in recent years; there is a sense that this is a vocational, value-added degree going forward. I have watched the college develop further colleges overseas in places such as Kuala Lumpur and Dhaka in Bangladesh, and in a number of European centres. The fact that the college is often just regarded as an alternative provider fails to acknowledge its genuine contribution to the vital eco-system of higher education, where this Bill, perhaps belatedly, is doing important work. Elements of this Bill would have come into place some five years ago had it not been for some high-profile problems arising.

It is fair to say that there is an apparent sense of rude health in this sector, and we all have to recognise that this is a hugely important business and revenue generator for UK plc. That is partly because of the benefit of our having the English language, but to a large extent it is because we have highly recognised and highly approved standards of quality. We perhaps take that for granted with our own education providers, be they in the HE or the FE sphere, but this is not necessarily the case in many other parts of the world. The Minister will know that we have some 125 publicly funded HE institutions, which have almost 2 million students. The sector employs 170,000 academic staff and has an income in excess of £25 billion per year.

The research side of what is being proposed in the Bill is crucial, as innovation is at the heart of what is done in many of our universities, although not all. It is right to recognise that some providers in this sphere will not go down the research route, recognising that they will be focusing largely on vocational education. It is also important that we bear in mind that it is not just spin-off companies from the Cambridge universities of this world that do well; a huge number of high-tech companies, in pharmaceuticals and in other areas, have tremendous successes.

I have been the MP in this district for the past 15 years. Right in the heart of London, we have a tremendous array of HE providers. We have the super Russell Group of the London School of Economics, King’s College London, Imperial and, just outside my constituency, University College London. They are globally successful universities, and in many ways the dominance in popular culture of Oxbridge is now being threatened, in a positive way, by the raising of standards by those four London universities, which are now global players in what they do.

I also have in my constituency one of the sites of the London Metropolitan University, which has been a troubled institution. I have worked with a number of MPs across the House to try to make the case for its continued existence in these troubled times. When I hear debates such as the one that took place earlier today on the idea of allowing universities to fail, I think that that is an important part of any economic eco-system. I do not deny that the implications of such a failure for employees and for students cannot be ignored, but I believe that that is a healthy state of affairs if universities are not doing the job and not providing the education that they ought to provide. If that education is not of appropriate quality or there is insufficient demand for it, universities should not be preserved just because they have existed as institutions for a long time.

I welcome the Bill. I shall focus my brief comments on part 1, which deals with the creation of the office for students. No one can deny that the regulatory system in this sector has evolved into a bafflingly complex framework of organisations and an alphabet spaghetti of acronyms. The overlap between the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Office for Fair Access and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education has rightly been identified. The new mechanism will get rid of that overlap.

I wholeheartedly support the recognition of the role of students as consumers. They are far more conscious of that role than they ever were in my time as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, and that is a positive thing. One of the by-products of students paying for their education is that they want to get good value from it. They will be much more critical of poor or repetitive teaching. They will want to ensure broadly that the facilities, both academic and non-academic, within the institutions to which they are paying that money are of a high standard. When I see undergraduates in my constituency, I am struck by how focused they are on getting the best out of their education. One might say that that is consumerism; one might say it is a source of regret for those of us who were at university in bygone decades. I think it is a healthy state of affairs that students take such matters seriously. The Bill implicitly recognises that by setting up the office for students.

The Bill needs full scrutiny in Committee and in the other place, where there are plenty of experts in this field. There are concerns about the granting of provisional degrees, which were mentioned earlier by the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden). The proposals to relax the criteria for validating degree-awarding powers will need to be examined thoroughly. I have some sympathy with the view that because the title of a university is much respected, it should be clearly protected and defined. I hope that if we have a system that allows market failures, the Government will make provision for the interests that need to be protected. No university should be seen as too big or too old and established to fail. A range of regulatory relationships will need to be clarified, but the Bill establishes an important new architecture for the higher education system.

One aspect that will no doubt be debated here and in Committee is Government and ministerial interference in university courses. We need to ensure above all that those institutions retain as much academic and administrative freedom as possible. That is important going forward.

I take this opportunity to congratulate the Secretary of State on the ambitious proposals set out in the Bill. She has already shown herself willing to put excellence and elitism at the heart of the state school system, with her open-mindedness about the expansion of the grammar school sector. As a committed Conservative and former grammar school boy, it is tremendous for me to hear a Conservative Government putting social mobility at the heart of our educational philosophy.

I regard the promotion of competition, variety and consumer choice as long overdue, so I am delighted that this Secretary of State and her Minister for Universities and Science have indicated the intention to take on the vested interests in this field. There are few things as conservative as the left-leaning cadre of vice-chancellors. I wish the Bill Godspeed and look forward to hearing the rest of the debate on it this afternoon.