Higher Education and Research Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Wes Streeting and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 9th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Wes Streeting]

I have long admired the quality enhancement approach of the Scottish higher education system and think the Scottish higher education sector has often led the way on student engagement in the quality enhancement process. The committee for QAA Scotland includes the head of Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland, the organisation that brings the sector together with student representatives to look at quality enhancement, and it does address the concern.

I have heard in some quarters—this comes to the point the hon. Member for Bath was trying to make in the Chamber yesterday—the argument that if there are students on the board of an institution, that somehow diminishes the need to engage students elsewhere within the institution. In the Quality Assurance Agency, there are two student representatives on the board, there are students represented elsewhere on committees in it, there is a whole committee dedicated to student engagement, and there are students involved in quality assessment as part of institutional review teams—not just in Scotland but in England as well, following the Scottish lead. That is a great model because the QAA has recognised, both in principle and through the benefit of experience, that involving students in a meaningful way in the quality assurance process has benefits for everyone. The student voice has to be involved and engaged. It is critical for helping to measure quality and making sure students get what they are promised.

[Ben Howlett]

If the hon. Gentleman had not tweeted earlier the fact he was going to ask this question, I would have had to come up with this on the spot. His point regarding the QAA is interesting. I agree that there should be student engagement throughout the entire system, but the point the QAA was making in oral evidence and in writing was that we should not have student representation on boards, even though it does at the moment, but that we should making sure we engage with students throughout the entire process. If we think about what it is saying, this is not working, so we have to look at a much more holistic approach to student engagement throughout the system.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Wes Streeting and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 8th Sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 15th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Wes Streeting]

It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I hope we will have the opportunity to hear more about your mind-expanding experiences at university. That was highly enlightening.

Britain has one of the best higher education systems in the world, educating millions of students from this country and around the world. Behind that success are hundreds of thousands of dedicated staff, ranging from university leaders and those who educate students on a daily basis to the many staff who perform essential support functions, from processing admissions to keeping our campuses clean.

Like any good employer, universities should invest in their staff and ensure that they are paid fairly. My motivation for tabling these amendments is to tackle two things. One is excessive high pay at the top of our universities, and the other is some of the remaining poverty rates that continue to be paid to staff working in and around higher education, particularly those working for university contractors.

I will begin with high pay. It is important to say that as leaders of universities, vice-chancellors carry serious responsibilities for a large number of staff, manage huge budgets and have to consider a wide range of activities, from research and innovation to educating students. It is right that we pay vice-chancellors at a rate that enables us to recruit and retain the very best leadership from this country and around the world. I certainly do not begrudge vice-chancellors appropriate payment for the work they do or, indeed, use the ludicrous benchmark that appears from time to time of comparing vice-chancellors’ salaries with the Prime Minister’s.

I have been concerned, however, about excessive rates of pay rises in recent years, particularly at a time of restraint in public spending and with students paying more than ever for their higher education. I do not use terms such as fat cat lightly, but vice-chancellors who have decent and appropriate salaries have been receiving fat-cat pay rises with little justification and certainly inappropriate scrutiny from institutional remuneration bodies.

I know that the Minister is concerned about that. In the HEFCE grant letter for this year, the Minister and the former Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), included a specific reference to excessive high pay at the top and urged universities to show greater restraint— incidentally, not only in terms of pay and pay rises, but in awards made to vice-chancellors on exit. I hope that the Minister will see the amendments as friendly ones that would help to pursue the issue that he and the former Secretary of State raised in the grant letter and could really make a difference.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good case for open and transparent processes in relation to vice-chancellors’ pay. I have a lot of sympathy with him about that. However, is he aware that this Government have already introduced gender pay gap reporting? For the institutions he mentions, the amendment would simply mean a duplication of legislation. We should look at enhancing the current legislation.

[Wes Streeting]

The hon. Gentleman is right to refer to the gender pay gap in higher education. There is something like an £8,000 difference in the pay awarded to male and female academic staff. My amendments do not deal specifically with the gender pay gap, but instead address the inequality between pay at the top and at the bottom.

The amendments would address those issues in two ways. The first is to require universities to publish the pay ratio between the highest-paid staff and the lowest-paid staff and the median rate of pay. That would get remuneration committees to think hard, when telling front-line staff that they cannot afford pay rises, about whether they are applying the same principle to staff at the top. According to the Times higher education survey, one in 10 universities paid their leaders 10% more in 2014-15 than the previous year, while average staff pay rose by just 2%. It is incredibly demoralising for university staff, academic staff and support staff when they feel they are exercising pay restraint but see university leaders not leading by example.

Publishing the pay ratio would bring about greater equity and a greater focus on low pay. I do not see any good reason why any university in this country should not be an accredited living wage employer. I hope that one outcome of the amendments would be to reinforce many of the campaigns led by students unions and trade unions to persuade universities to become accredited living wage employers.

As well as proposing publishing information to push for transparency, the amendments would strengthen accountability by including staff and student representatives on remuneration committees. That is important for two reasons. One is that staff representatives, through the University and College Union and other trade unions, and student representatives, through their students unions, bring a degree of independence from the process. They have a legitimate interest in ensuring fair pay from a staff perspective and also from a student perspective, in terms of ensuring that their fees are well spent.

There is also a broader point, which ties into the interesting exchange earlier about the idea of a university being, as well as all the things that the Minister set out in his response to my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, a community. An important part of a university is the academic community in the university. It is not made up just of university leaders and staff; students are also part of it, and I think that it is important to include them in the decision-making process.

I therefore hope that the Minister looks favourably on the amendments. They would reinforce the signal that he has already sent through the HEFCE grant letter. They would help to concentrate more effectively the minds of remuneration committees, as well as bringing about a wider range of perspectives to ensure that they are reaching the right conclusion, to the benefit of students, staff and the taxpayer. I hope that the Minister supports the amendments.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Wes Streeting and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Wes Streeting]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, who has made an enormous contribution to the debate on higher education in this place over a great many years. I know she shares some of my frustrations about these issues.

When the Dearing report was first published, it placed a tripartite principle at the heart of contribution. All the beneficiaries were expected to make a contribution: society, through general taxation, employers, and students themselves as graduates. I will not open the funding debate in its entirety today as that is outside the scope of the Bill, but I must say to those outside this place who take an interest and watch these proceedings that I share some of their frustrations that the scope of the Bill means the Opposition cannot set the direction of higher education policy on a radically different course, by placing more progressive principles at the heart of the Bill. To have that opportunity, a party needs to win a general election. There is a lesson in that as people make their choices.

To return to the scope of the Bill and in particular the amendments tabled by the Opposition, not only is there a lack of general protection for students, but the proposed office for students itself epitomises the problem with the Bill as it stands: students have their name on the door but they do not have a seat at the table. The amendments seek to ensure that students are represented on the board of the office for students.

I listened carefully to what the Minister said about the responsibilities that board members have for not just representing their own perspectives or interests but promoting the broader interests of higher education. I speak as someone who has been a student nominee on the governing body of the University of Cambridge, the board of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, the Higher Education Academy, and several other bodies that I cannot instantly recall, during my previous life as president of the National Union of Students. It has always been accepted that when someone accepts a role as a board member, they are not there solely to represent their own interests; they must take on a broader responsibility for the duties of the body concerned, particularly where that is a public body. That would be implicit and explicit in the student representatives’ responsibilities.

[Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)]

The Care Quality Commission was mentioned earlier. There is no patient on the board of that organisation to represent the views of patients, because things evolve quickly. How does the hon. Gentleman want student voices to be engaged more effectively? The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, which the Labour party requested give oral evidence to the Committee, provided a probably successful and succinct idea for embedding the student voice by representing and engaging students at every level, not by having a token director on the board. Other regulators in the system certainly do not. Why not embed and engage students throughout the system as we move on?

[Wes Streeting]

Given the nature of the role of board members, those people would not be token; they would in fact have serious duties and responsibilities, and their voices and valuable perspectives would be heard at the heart of discussions. I might argue, by the way, that patient interests really ought to be represented on the board of the Care Quality Commission, but that is certainly outside the scope of the Bill. I have a serious point: I urge the hon. Gentleman and the Minister to agree with the new Prime Minister, who has said some interesting things since her elevation to the highest office about the importance of having worker and consumer representatives on company boards. That is an interesting point that ought to be addressed at the heart of the Bill.

Whether we believe that students are consumers of higher education or we prefer to see them as co-producers, both those visions would be served by these amendments, because students’ voices would be heard on the board of the office for students. I propose that there should be two student representatives, because I found—particularly in the higher education sector—that it was often helpful for there to be someone else who shared my perspective and experience when I was sat at the table with people who had often been around for some time, had been through the mill and had a great deal of experience. That principle has been supported by the evidence that the Committee has gathered. It is regrettable that we had only one NUS representative in, and for only 15 minutes. We had two GuildHE representatives in for an hour. In fact, we heard a whole range of perspectives from just the universities represented during our evidence gathering, but there was very limited time for students. I hope that we do not make the same mistake with the architecture of the higher education system.

Placing students on the board of the office for students would bring to life the Minister’s commitment that the new body will place students at the heart of its work. We might have a debate about the best mechanism for that and the appointments process. I have suggested, for example, that the board itself should appoint student representatives, there might be some chopping and changing as a result of turnover or churn, and the Secretary of State may not want to get bogged down in annual or biannual appointments.

We can debate implementation and perhaps even tidy it up on Report, but at this stage I would like the Government to commit to including students on the board of the office for students. That is not much to ask. It would not have a great cost, but there would be an opportunity cost of excluding students. Students have a valuable perspective to offer. There are countless examples of NUS representatives, student union representatives and students themselves making valuable contributions to university governing bodies and higher education bodies and enhancing the quality of our higher education sector as a result. I commend these amendments to the Committee and hope for a favourable hearing from the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Howlett]

rose—

[Wes Streeting]

I give way to the hon. Member for Bath, in the hope that he has had a change of heart.

[Ben Howlett]

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman is withdrawing his amendment, but some of the examples he has cited show that student representation can be looked at by one of the committees provided for in schedule 1. If he tables further amendments on student representation, surely he should look at that at a committee level, rather than board level.

[Wes Streeting]

It comes back to the Minister’s point, which is that we do not want to see tokenistic representation. The board of the office for students is the governing body of the institution; it has powerful regulatory functions to oversee and it will have a degree of responsibility for allocation of resources. It is quite right that the student perspective should be heard right at the top.

I fear that the Government’s reluctance at this point in our discussion to include student representation will go down very badly throughout the country, not just among student representatives—many of us have large student constituencies—but with the sector, as we saw in the evidence session. I am sorry that university and higher education sector leaders seem to have a greater appetite for, and understanding of, the true value of student representation than the Government have demonstrated this afternoon. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Amendment proposed: 122, in schedule 1, page 63, line 18, at end insert—

“( ) At least one of the ordinary members appointed under sub-paragraph (1)(d) must, at the time of their appointment, be currently engaged in the representation or promotion of the interests of individual students, or students generally, on higher education courses provided by higher education providers.”—(Mr Marsden.)

This amendment would ensure that at least one of the members must be a student representative.

Higher Education and Research Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Wes Streeting and Ben Howlett

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 8th September 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Howlett]

Q What benefit will this Bill have for the most disadvantaged in society?

Joseph Johnson: In many, many ways it will help the most disadvantaged in society. First of all, we are introducing significant reforms on how we deal with transparency in the sector. Universities will be under an obligation to publish full information about their admissions processes and their offer rates, broken down by characteristics such as socio-economic disadvantage. We are putting a duty on UCAS to publish its data in a way that has not fully been available to researchers before. The teaching excellence framework will encourage institutions to focus on how much support they are giving to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and we are strengthening the powers of the director for fair access, widening his role to participation too.

[Wes Streeting]

Q Looking at the evidence of the amendments, what do you think now are the weaknesses in the Bill that you would like to address in Committee and on Report?

Joseph Johnson: We are always keen to hear from Members of the Committee and broader stakeholders with a strong interest in the Bill on how we can strengthen it and make it better. That is what this is all about. I have been working on this for 14 months.