Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Deech for securing this debate and express my agreement with many of the themes in her speech. I declare my interest as a jobbing academic and, having listened to what has already been said this afternoon, I speak with great relief that I did not have to compete with AI, although I think some very important things have been said on that subject this afternoon.

Because of the exigencies of my life, being married to an academic whose books were occasionally more fashionable than mine, I have travelled around a lot. I have taught in one of the old polytechnics, been a fellow of a Cambridge college, taught at a fairly basic, if I can say that, American state university and at an American Ivy League school, so I have seen educational systems in this country and abroad. I have been an external examiner in Galway and in the European university in Florence. I have been around a bit—it is multicoloured—and what I am going to say is based on that experience.

The first thing I want to say is that I agree with all those who have spoken this afternoon and said we talk so often in this country about our world-leading this and that, but the one thing that really is world-leading is our higher education. The figures are indisputable. If you look at the top 10 universities or the number of universities—it is 26—we have in the top 200 in the THE list, or look at the QS list and so on, the figures are indisputable. Holland is perhaps one country that comes even remotely near to the level of achievement of this country. We really are, in this respect, if not in others, genuinely world-leading, and it is something to be very proud of.

In the lead-up to this debate, I have been reading and preparing. On the research assessment exercise—or REF as it is now known—I was really surprised to see the very fine professor, Stefan Collini, saying:

“Few things would improve the intellectual culture of universities more quickly than the complete abolition of this flawed and coercive exercise”.


I can assure noble Lords that, if you are teaching in an unfashionable provincial university, as I was at the time, there is nothing more liberating. Anybody who has read a novel about provincial university life will realise the need for some sort of external coercive pressure, saying, “Research is important”. It is vital and liberating.

I know quite a lot about the educational system in Ireland and enormously respect the intellectual culture there, but one of the reasons why Ireland has only one university in the top 200 is simply the absence of a similar mechanism to the research assessment exercise over the last four or five decades. It definitely propels the system upward. I know it is gamed and I know there are brutal and silly aspects to it, but, none the less, broadly speaking, I am strongly opposed to the idea that it would be liberating to drop that or equivalent forms of that exercise. It is one reason for the research excellence of our university system.

If I may say something else from my experience of teaching in an American Ivy League school, I would make a traditional humanist point. Oxford and Cambridge are great research universities, but they are also great teaching universities. Princeton now is quite rightly shooting up the league table towards the top, but, like most American Ivy League schools, it is not an undergraduate teaching institution in the way that Oxford and Cambridge are. It is just not a priority. Again, from a traditional humanist point of view, I think it is something we can congratulate ourselves on.

One thing that we cannot congratulate ourselves on is something which was certainly not part of my student life in Cambridge: I am still amazed by the rise of antisemitism in our universities. I am just surprised, because that is something I never expected to see, so I want to qualify my praise for our system.

Finally, there is no question but that the golden age of financing is gone. The Chancellor recently said:

“It is not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so”.


These are our students, who are now the political class, telling us this, and there is no going back to the golden age. I think the implication has to be fewer universities than those we currently have. If you look at what the incoming Prime Minister has been saying about localism and the fact that more and more students are staying at home because of costs, that means fairness requires more good, locally established universities right across the country.

In conclusion, this particularly applies to my home place in Northern Ireland. I taught at both the main universities there. They both have great things to their credit. In 2024, Times Higher Education said that the University of Ulster was the best university of the year. Queen’s University, where I taught for most of my career, has just gone up a number of places, significantly and impressively, in the QS rankings, but the university also has a major financial crisis. It is time to look at whether we really need two universities in such a small place as Northern Ireland. I suspect that is also a debate to be had in other parts of the country.