Higher Education and Research Bill (First sitting)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Carol Monaghan]

Q The OFS as the regulating body will be funded by subscriptions from higher education institutions. New providers or new entrants, by their nature, will be a higher risk than the more established institutions. Is it right that all institutions pay the same amount of subscriptions or should there be some sort of sliding scale?

Professor Simon Gaskell: Some thought needs to be given to this because you are right, not every institution will require the same degree of scrutiny. You could argue that the most established and most reliable institutions should pay least. To be fair, there is some offset against that, building on my earlier point: we are all concerned with the reputation of the sector and we all have an interest in the sector. I would not suggest an exact proportionality, but some system that takes note that the greatest demands on the OFS will come from the providers who represent the greatest risk seems to me a reasonable principle.

Pam Tatlow: I understand there will be a consultation if this remains in the Bill, but the more general point is that this is a direct switch from funding from what is now the Department for Education to universities and the average would be about £62,000. If you look at the White Paper, it shows that over several years, the bulk of funding for the OFS will come from providers.

Paul Kirkham: To be clear, not all independent providers are new and pose that kind of risk. Many have decades, if not hundreds of years, of experience in provision. My second point is that it should be equitable in terms of the cost. Many of the incumbent universities’ perceived lower risks have been achieved through decades of taxpayer support and I think it would be grossly unfair if a sliding scale were applied on the basis of some form of perceived risk.

Gordon McKenzie: As well as risk, it is also important to take account of a university or a provider’s size and resources.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Q This is a question specifically for Professor Gaskell. I should begin by declaring that my wife is technically a student at Queen Mary University London.

Professor Simon Gaskell: What does technically mean?

[Matt Warman]

Technically in the sense that she is on maternity leave, but she is still part of it.

The Universities UK report on sustainability and the future of higher education regulation was recently a tangential part of the Science and Technology Committee’s review of the future provision of skills. How do you feel the Bill addresses the concerns you brought up in that report?

Professor Simon Gaskell: I think I have covered some of those things already, in the sense that we were looking for a simplification of the system—an assurance of equity of treatment of all providers, whether established or new. That led us to propose a tiered register of providers, which would go well beyond the current HEFCE register, which is essentially a list. A key point that was emphasised in the UUK report was that the register has to have very clearly defined entry standards to protect both the reputation of the sector and, crucially, the position of students at less secure institutions. Indeed, it is often overlooked, but we also need to protect the interests of the alumni of those institutions. If you graduate from an institution that lasted for four years and then disappeared in a puff of smoke, you have a degraded qualification.

The need for a register was emphasised so much in the UUK report because all those things add up to the need not to simply try out a new institution, as it were, or give it an opportunity to fail. The failure of an institution is very problematic for students and the general public, and for the locality in which that institution is placed, because institutions often make critical contributions to their locations. To us, all that adds up to the need not only for a register, which the Bill certainly includes, but for a clear indication and a secure prescription of entry standards for that register, in the interests of students, the public and the locations in which universities are based.

[The Chair]

I am sorry to rush you, but we have nine minutes remaining and four Members want to ask questions. I am going to turn first to Roberta Blackman-Woods, then Valerie Vaz, Roger Mullin and Gordon Marsden. No Government Members have indicated that they want to ask any further questions.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Three Members, 10 minutes.

[Matt Warman]

Q I want to return to the issue of data, but not looking at the social mobility aspect. We know that students struggle to come to sensible decisions in their own eyes about which university to go to. Do you feel the Bill will address the level of data that is available to students to allow them to make better decisions about which universities to go to?

Mary Curnock Cook: Honestly, the more data that are published—whether that is about who goes to university, who does not go to university, what qualifications they go with and their retention and success in their studies, which relates to the transparency clause—the more that organisations like UCAS have a much better opportunity to make that information available and accessible to students. A lot of students and the people who advise them think that they have information overload, because there are so many sources of it in the technological age. It is not as simple as just making more and more information available. The transparency duty and the ability of UCAS to make data available to researchers will be helpful overall.

[Matt Warman]

Q Would the duty put organisations such as UCAS in a better position to be able to translate the data and see what the worthwhile stuff is that students should perhaps look at first?

Mary Curnock Cook: It does not necessarily put UCAS itself in a better position, because we have most of the data. The critical bit for us is being able to link our data with the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which then allows us to track progress all the way through. We are talking to HESA about doing that so that the transparency goes right through application, retention and success and even to employment afterwards.

[The Chair]

Do any other panel members wish to comment? No.