Higher Education

Viscount Chandos Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Blunkett for securing this debate and for his compelling introduction. I am tempted to say, “The prosecution rests, m’lud”, and sit down, but your Lordships will be disappointed that I shall try to add a few points to those made by my noble friend.

The array of former Education Ministers, vice-chancellors and other higher education experts speaking today reminds me, in making my declarations of interest, of my status as an enthusiastic amateur in a field of professionals. I am a trustee of the drama school, LAMDA; chair of an apprenticeship provider, the Credit Services Association; and an external member of the investment committee of Worcester College, Oxford, of which I am an alumnus. I am also a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee of your Lordships’ House, which published its report on the OfS and the challenges for the HE sector last summer. I look forward to debating that when the usual channels have agreed a date.

I shall try to avoid repeating the data and arguments already set out compellingly by other speakers. Higher education is vital to growth, productivity and levelling up, as well as to non-economic benefits, such as health, life expectancy, crime reduction and the general strengthening of civil society, as cogently argued by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in the Economy 2030 Inquiry and touched on in his speech a moment ago.

The impact of universities

“on human and intangible capital is self-evident”,

as Jonathan Grant and Andy Westwood wrote for the Bennett Institute for Public Policy—self-evident, but perhaps hard to measure. That may be one reason why too much of the debate about higher education policy in recent years has focused on the more measurable economic benefits, nationally and locally, to the communities and regions in which universities are located. These are important and hugely welcome consequences of investing in HE, but does the Minister agree that there should be absolute clarity that the mission of universities and other HE institutions to provide UK students with the highest-quality higher education should be first, second and third at the heart of government policy?

Excellence in teaching and research costs money. We seem to have reached a position, as my noble friend Lord Howarth has already said, where student fees and living costs are becoming higher than many young people can take on responsibly, while UK undergraduate fees are increasingly inadequate to fund the universities’ provision for teaching these degrees—a circle that will need somehow to be squared by future Governments.

In the meantime, I will end by briefly raising the disparity of wealth and endowments among UK universities. The US system is different, but it is worth remembering that, among the private universities—Harvard, Yale and Stanford—there are endowments of $40 billion to $50 billion, generating a return of $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year for those universities. But even among the public universities in the US, there are 50 with endowments of over £1 billion. In the UK, Oxford and Cambridge each has endowments that are 16 times greater than those of the next best-endowed university, Edinburgh. I do not for a moment want to discourage donations to either Oxford or Cambridge—to my former college, Lindsay Owen-Jones has been a recent, enormously generous benefactor—but we need to level up and find ways in which to assist the many other excellent universities to boost current and capital fundraising through match funding and other initiatives.