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.

Leveson Inquiry

Lord Bew Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I shall speak solely on one aspect of the Leveson debate: the Irish dimension, which clearly exists. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter has already referred to it and, even the day before the Leveson report was published, the Scottish First Minister said that the Irish model should be the Leveson model and urged it on the Prime Minister. This showed a rare courage on behalf of the Scottish First Minister as he had spent some years previously endorsing the Irish economic model only to find that rebounding back on him in a rather problematic way.

However, there is no question but that Sir Brian Leveson paid great attention to the experience in Dublin and the regulator in Ireland, the very distinguished historian, John Horgan, came to London to give important evidence. In his speech on the Leveson report in the other place the Deputy Prime Minister referred to this and quite rightly said that it was hard to argue that there was,

“a deeply illiberal press environment across the Irish Sea”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/12; col. 471.]

Another Liberal Democrat MP, Mr Tim Farron, also argued that something similar to Leveson was already in place in Ireland. When replying, the Prime Minister had the Irish Defamation Act with him at the Dispatch Box and recommended that Members of the House should study it. I have studied it and it will be at the core of what I have to say.

I wish to argue, first, that the Leveson recommendations are significantly different from the Irish model and significantly tougher. Secondly, I would argue that there are some problems that we ought to at least be aware of when we talk about the Irish model.

Leveson is tougher than the model in place in Dublin in three respects. I refer particularly to the summary of recommendations of Leveson at paragraph 5(d), when he argues that the board of an independent, self-regulatory body should not include any serving editor. In contrast, the Irish press council includes serving editors of the leading Dublin newspapers.

Secondly, again unlike Ireland, Leveson recommends that the proposed press board in Britain should allow people other than those directly affected to make complaints and that the board should have the power to examine issues on its own initiative. Again that is not the case in Dublin.

Finally, of course, it is widely understood that Leveson argues for a maximum £1 million fine on errant publications, while in Ireland the only sanction is to request such publications prominently to publish the decisions of the press council. So the Leveson model is significantly stronger than the model in place in Dublin.

I say that simply for the purposes of clarification. I fully accept that they do not resolve the argument, one way or the other, about the content of the Leveson proposals.

If Leveson is significantly tougher, what are the implications? The Deputy Prime Minister made the point—it has also been made in this House today—that a number of UK newspapers have accepted for their Irish market, so to speak, this light touch regulation. The Deputy Prime Minister was right to say that Ireland does not have a deeply illiberal press environment—of course it does not—but does it have quite the same tradition of freedom of expression of opinion that we are used to in this country? Is it quite as vibrant?

On the week after the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech, the Dublin Sunday Independent, the leading Sunday newspaper in Ireland, noted that,

“The confluence of separate recent controversies around varied issues and the increasingly regular private litigation against journalists has facilitated the evolution of a subtle frost over how freely we can speak”.

There is an argument that all sections of this House and the other place welcomed the report by Sir Desmond de Silva and the Finucane inquiry and welcomed the Prime Minister’s apology about a very grim moment in the recent history of our country, but anyone who knows the history of that inquiry will know that it is extremely unlikely that there would have been an inquiry at all but for the fact that there were briefings of journalists by some sections of the police in ways which Leveson has now set its face against.

It is clear that there has been in many respects a rather disgraceful relationship between the police and journalists in the United Kingdom, but I simply draw attention to the complexity of these issues. This is a case where the House as a whole says, “It is wonderful that we now know the truth”, but does not want to face up to some of the means by which we got to know the truth.

Let me make a final critical point. The Prime Minister referred to the Irish Defamation Act 2009 and Clause 26 reads to me like a transaction in which the press agrees to be regulated but is allowed to offer a public interest defence. All parties here have reached the point where we accept that the press has a right to offer a public interest defence in defamation cases, but not as part of a transaction: we accept that the press has that right. So, again, there is a sense in which the Irish analogy does not quite hold. It leaves open entirely the questions, pro and con, about Leveson. There is no Irish gold standard and there is no model in Dublin ready to be packed on an Aer Lingus flight and flown over to London for our use.