Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is to be congratulated on stimulating a very good debate. I agree with her fundamentally about freedom of speech and the shocking rise in antisemitism and intolerance in our universities, but I do not agree with the central thrust of her argument: that we should revert to having a more elitist higher education system.

I was a product of the elitist system when, in 1964, I got a telegram telling me I had won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, as only 6% of my age group went to university. I had a great time. My dad was a railway clerk, and I had a full grant with all my fees paid. I went on to do a master’s for another two years—all at the public’s expense. It was great.

However, I think we were right to make higher education a mass model; that degree of generosity to an elite could not be sustained. It was obviously unfair that people who did not go to university paid high taxes for the people who did, and therefore the fee system had a great logic to it.

I had the privilege of being chair of council at Lancaster University for seven years, and there I saw how wonderful this mass expansion of higher education had been. That institution had one of the best equity records among academic, research-intensive universities in recruiting state school students, and it also came out very well in the research assessment exercise. So, in principle, that can be done and we should resist the temptation to go back to a narrowly based elite system.

In our politics, the Member for Makerfield, who is about to become Prime Minister, will recognise that the core of the economic success of Manchester is its university sector and its contribution to the great revival of that city. That story is there right across Britain.

Obviously, there are, as my friend the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said, no grounds for complacency, and there is something of a crisis. I think we can overcome this. We must not restrict international students. Prioritising immigration control over international students is the wrong decision. There are efficiencies that can be realised in universities; I saw that as chair of council. A small university such as Lancaster should be considering partnerships and mergers. Indeed, on one occasion, I proposed to the University of York that we merge to create a roses university, which would have saved quite a lot of administration. There are efficiencies that can be made. However, I agree with those who do not like the way humanities is being run down. That is not in conformity with my ideal of what a university should be about. The criterion for assessing the worthwhileness of courses cannot be only employability and earning power; we have to recognise the value of people who study the arts, or even theology. That is a very important contribution to society.

One thing that has not been mentioned in this debate is the great need for the post-16 education and training system to be improved. Universities should be thinking about how they can contribute to that. One of the radical things the previous Government did—in fact, it was Gavin Williamson, who I would not normally congratulate—was to introduce the idea of modular courses being part of the lifelong learning entitlement. Universities should be looking at how they can co-operate in partnership with further education colleges to make that a reality.

As my final point, I advise the Government to look at the affordability question, particularly for graduates on these plan 2 loans. I think it is very unfair and is one of the reasons we are finding, in the Labour Party, that a lot of young people are going off to the Greens: if you get a salary of 50 grand a year, you are effectively paying a 50% marginal tax rate. That is not acceptable for people who have spent years devoted to study.