Higher Education Students: Statutory Duty of Care

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Robert. I pay tribute to the 128,000-plus people who signed the petition, many of whom have their own very personal stories. I say a big thank you to the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for making a very passionate, thoughtful and human speech at the beginning of the debate. Indeed, I found everybody’s contributions personally moving, and I am sure that people in the Public Gallery also thought so.

In paying tribute to all those people who signed the petition, and in particular those who had a very personal reason for doing so, it is my privilege and honour to speak in memory of Oskar Carrick, who died by suicide two years ago. His parents, Maxine and Gary, are with us today. As the hon. Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson) said just now, everybody involved in this campaign is immensely selfless. They have lost somebody utterly dear to them, they have experienced—are experiencing—appalling grief, and yet their thought is, “What can we do to protect other families from the same thing?” We all owe them a huge debt of thanks for their care for those who come next and for their determination to ensure that practical lessons are learnt.

Oskar had made an attempt on his life, and despite the fact that both he and his parents had consented for the university to disclose information, that incident was not passed on to Oskar’s mum and dad. Whether that was because of GDPR concerns—a sense of a person’s right as an adult to privacy—or whatever else, that was massively wrong-headed. As the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) pointed out, a huge proportion of students at university are not 18 to 22-year-olds, but whatever their age they are potentially vulnerable, and we all need to have somebody who cares for us on the outside. The thought that a higher education institution of any kind should have any hesitation about sharing such vital information with parents and loved ones—because of concerns about legality, form, traditions, GDPR or whatever it might be—is clearly wrong and it is important that universities understand that. I hope that the Minister will be clear that parents and loved ones should be informed when there is a legitimate concern about somebody’s mental health.

The simple ask of the petition is that a statutory duty of care should be placed on universities, and having worked in higher education for 13 years before I entered this place, I understand why there is some pushback. But universities are wrong to push back. The truth of the matter is that students are not regular customers. As other hon. Members have mentioned, universities have a duty of care to their staff and yet apparently not, in the same distinct way, to their students. Students are not the same as regular customers for obvious reasons. Despite the fact that many do not fit the typical demographic, the majority are young people living away from home for the first time, and of course they have recently gone through, as we all have, the enormous disruption of covid and all that went along with it.

We are also in a time when it feels like there is a great unkindness in the discourse. In the ’60s, Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. He did not know the half of it. In this future, everybody is famous all the time on social media. People like us—Members of Parliament—are meant to deal with that professionally; we are meant to be resilient. But human beings who are not Members of Parliament—young people, whatever age they are—do not have the resilience to cope with that constant judgment and exposure because of the society we are in. Of course universities need to take their duty of care seriously: it should be statutorily placed on them.

I have two kids at university. I also spent 13 years working in higher education before I entered this place. Before that even, I was the president of Newcastle University’s students’ union. It was a different kettle of fish in those days, not least because there were fewer students. People did not pay fees; there was not even the concept of students being customers. Universities were smaller. It was less possible to disappear in the late 1980s and early 1990s as it is today. Universities are far larger now, with cities full of students from more than one institution. The ability to get lost is that much greater. The need for us step in and take care in a practical way is much greater than it was then.

It is not all down to universities. This is not me castigating the entire higher education sector for its failures. I am reminding them of the fact that they have responsibilities—some legal, some moral. Today we are talking about potentially making the moral responsibilities also legal. As has been mentioned, by the time a person who has a mental health condition, or is perhaps developing one, goes to university, they may well have been let down for several years before they get there.

The simple fact is that universities are very often filling the gap that child and adolescent mental health services have not been able to fill due to a lack of funding for years before. Today we have a society where we talk about mental health more than we did. That is a good thing, and there is less of a stigma, but we are a society that breeds worse mental health than any other in human history.

We talk about parity of esteem and treating mental and physical health the same, but we do not. If an 18-year-old or 19-year-old playing rugby, cricket or football or running or whatever breaks their leg on a weekend, they are straight into the system there and then. The healing begins that day. If something not visible to the eye were to break in that person, even if it happened to them when they were 14, they may wait months and months for a first appointment to be seen. This is something we all own and all have responsibility to, not just the higher education sector.

We have to learn the lesson of the importance of building resilience in youth, not just in dealing with poor mental health, but building good mental health. I go running not because I am ill, but to try to fight off middle age and make sure I stay relatively well. The same goes for our mental health. We must look after our mental health before we become unwell. Young people need help to do that. That is why outdoor education is so important and should be integrated in residentials and into every child’s learning experience at primary and secondary schools, so that that level of resilience is built for when tough times come.

As has been said, suicide is preventable. In many ways, that is the most heart-breaking thing about it. I know that from personal experience of a loved one of mine who passed away in that way—thinking of whether there is something that I or any of us could have done. I want to pay tribute to PAPYRUS, which does wonderful work in engaging with and supporting suicide prevention, but also to the three dads—Mike, Andy and Tim—who drew attention to their own plight, having lost their daughters Beth, Sophie and Emily. They tried to make sure, like the families here today, that others do not experience what they did by recognising the importance of trying to build suicide prevention into the curriculum.

All of us must take on that responsibility. This debate is focused on the petition, which asks higher education institutions to step up to the plate and accept that duty of care, and indeed for the Government to impose it on them. We entrust our young people into the hands of august higher education institutions. It is so important that as we entrust our young people—predominantly, young people—into institutions’ care, they respond by providing care and kindness, paying attention to their needs, not letting anybody fall between the cracks and making sure that people’s loved ones back home are always kept informed of how they are. That way they can intervene and prevent appalling tragedies occurring again in the future.