Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, first, I should declare an interest as a full-time Academic Council member of King’s College, London. I had not expected to speak in this part of the debate and I am afraid that I will be speaking again later. But, since I am on my feet, I would like to say that I agree with all noble Lords who have expressed their appreciation of how the Government have listened to opinions and to the House generally. I, too, feel that we have come a long way. In this context, I will bring back a couple of points that were made in the earlier debates by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and by me in the context of amendments that we had tabled. Since the noble Duke is unable to be here today, I will make them briefly on behalf of us both.

Along with almost all noble Lords here, we strongly welcome the delay in implementing the link with fees—here I endorse the remarks of my noble friend Lord Kerslake. I am delighted to hear that we are moving quickly towards a position where we will have subject-level rather than institution-level assessments. However, one reason we became so concerned about the TEF is that putting a label on an institution is potentially very damaging to it.

One thing that has been rather an eye-opener for me is the extent to which—perhaps inevitably and as someone who teaches public management I should not be surprised—the “sector” is, in the view of the Government, the organised universities and Universities UK, and how few good mechanisms there are for the Bill team and the department to get the voices of students, as opposed to occasionally that of the National Union of Students. Students have been desperately concerned about this, because they are in a world where they pay fees and where the reputation of their institutions is so important. They have been worried about and deeply opposed to anything that puts a single label on them. This single national ranking caused many of us concern.

I will say a couple of things that I hope the incoming Secretary of State will bear in mind. First, as others have alluded to, we have a pilot going on and a system of grades that is out there. I fully understand that that is under way and there are enormous lessons to be learned from it. However, I hope very much that, after the election, whoever the Government may be will think hard about how they use that information, how they publish it, and whether they are in any sense obliged to come forward with the type of single-rank national league table that has caused so much anxiety to students. That is of great concern and it is hard to see how it serves the purpose, also expressed in the current Conservative manifesto, of preserving the reputation of our great university sector.

The other thing, on which I do not have any particular inspiration but about which I would love the incoming Government to think, is how to widen out their contacts with not just the organised sector and Universities UK but the academics and students who are really what the sector is about. We have great universities not because we have activist managerial vice-chancellors but because they are autonomous in large measure internally as well as vis-à-vis the state. That has been of real concern to me. Since we are going to have an Office for Students, it would be very good if, post the election, we could make it genuinely an office for students.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very big Bill. I share the feeling of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, that perhaps this subject is one we will not see again for some time to come and so ought to enjoy what we are seeing now. The train passes slowly, but it is a very important one and we should pay regard to it.

We should also bear in mind that the Bill attracted more than 700 amendments and resulted in, at our last count this morning, 31 major concessions made by the Government to the voices raised, in the other place and particularly in here, in relation to some of the issues we heard about today. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, was right to reflect on the fact that what we have in front of us today, although really important, is the end of the process, not the whole of it. We should not forget that within the list of concessions—“concessions” gives the wrong sense; I mean the things that moved in the Bill—there are important aspects. There is not just freedom of speech, which she mentioned and which is of course tremendously important, but also measures that will improve collaboration within the sector, that will help reverse the decline in part-time students, that will assist mature students who wish to come back, and that pave the way for more work to be done on credit transfer and flexible courses. These are all really important changes to the infrastructure of our higher education system and will make it better. They have not been picked up today because they were dealt with earlier in the process, but they should not be forgotten as they are important.

We have also heard nothing today about UKRI and the developments made in that whole area, which are to change radically the consensus on operating within science and research more generally that has gone on for nearly 30 years in one form or another. It is important that we also reflect that those changes went through after debate and discussion—and some minor adjustments but not many—primarily because there was an effort to make sure that the words used to describe the change were understood properly. A lot of time was spent in going round talking to people and making sure they were happy with that. That was a good thing. Indeed, this whole process, as has been touched on already by a number of noble Lords, is an example of what this House is good at but should be more widely developed within our political debates and discussions: that there is room for civilised debate and discussion about every issue. It does not have to be party political, as my noble friend Lord Blunkett said. It can be small-p political. It can be aimed at trying to arrive at a better overall solution, and I am sure that what we are achieving today has ticked the box in all these areas.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, this is a golden thread in our debate that has been pursued with considerable vigour by the noble Baroness, who has on every occasion, I think, asked difficult questions. In fact, she has been quite free with her favours, asking questions of me and of other noble Lords around the whole Chamber when we have failed to measure up to her high standards of accuracy and precision when mentioning the words “English”, “higher” and “education” in sequence.

Here we are at the crunch point. The noble Baroness has put down a very specific amendment that would have quite strong repercussions for any body attempting to recruit English higher education students, because along with students comes public money. The main argument as I take it—and we look forward to hearing about it from the Minister—is that we are risking public money on bodies when we have no certain knowledge about where and how they are incorporated and what rights and responsibilities they have to the students. She could have mentioned several other areas and it is important to get them on the record. Under the Consumer Rights Act, students are owed a duty of care by the providers of their course. Specific issues must be supplied by the institutions and remedies for students lie in legal protections, which would be exercised in court. If the bodies are not incorporated in the UK, how are they going to manage that? I think the Minister should respond to that in a positive way.

We are also concerned with insolvency issues. It is quite interesting and instructive that most of the Technical and Further Education Bill—which is accompanying this Bill through Parliament—is taken up with measures that apply if a college of further education goes into insolvency or is wound up. There is a special education administration regime with particular powers for the insolvency practitioner appointed to ensure that students rank above all other creditors and that their courses will continue, if possible, or be transferred to a similar institution if not. Creditors, who in insolvency law—as I am sure your Lordships’ House is well aware—are normally given primacy, are relegated to second place. We have no such system for higher education institutions in the UK. There is therefore no provision for what happens when a private company, in particular, decides it no longer wishes to teach its students. Where will the students seek redress? The cases mentioned by the noble Baroness are relevant in this jurisdiction as well as abroad. It will be very interesting to see how students will recover their loans and their opportunities if there is no incorporation which allows them to do so.

We are discussing this when there has been a change of ownership of a very distinguished private provider, BPP. That situation is not nearly so dire as the one I have been discussing but nevertheless reflects a very major arrangement. The ownership has changed. The senior management have decided to not continue and there is still uncertainty about how the overall firm will be run. This is a real situation involving large numbers of students, lots of money and very difficult legal and jurisprudential positions.

The Government are taking this seriously. I had a letter delivered to my hand as I walked into the Chamber. It deals in four pages with some of the issues that the noble Baroness raised. I am not in any sense wanting to make slight of the letter because it is useful to have it on the record, but the Government seem to be broadly of the view that the existing arrangements under which the Office for Students—surely we will be shortly be calling it the Office for Higher Education, as we prefer—will have responsibilities under the registration and degree-awarding powers will make sure that nothing untoward happens. That is not sufficient. We need greater certainty about what institutions are responsible for our students, how they are responsible, in what way they are incorporated and what the legal position is.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response, but I do not think that he will be able to measure up to some of the very strong critiques that have been made so far.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, has pointed out, we are in the strange position where one has far greater protection if one is studying for a higher education qualification in a further education college than if one is in a university, because there are very clear requirements, now going through this House, for what should happen if that institution becomes insolvent.

This issue has been raised on a number of occasions in this Chamber, where it has been argued that, although the Government have committed to a protection regime for students in higher education, it is not very clear or demanding, as far as we can tell. The amendment goes a step further, because it draws attention, as have my noble friend Lady O’Neill and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to a situation in which, over and above issues relating to the institution delivering the education, there is an issue of ownership. It may mean that, in extreme situations, it is unclear where students would seek redress, never mind how.

The Government are aware of the new issues that have come about as a result of creating a sector in which providers can be bought and sold. In 2015, they asked HEFCE to look at this issue and, as a result, there are now some new regulations about the treatment of degree-awarding powers in the event of a change of ownership or legal status. In that situation, HEFCE must discuss the potential implications for degree-awarding powers, including continued eligibility to hold them, and must be assured that the original institution that was awarded the powers is in substance the same institution in spite of the change of ownership. That is what is happening with BPP at the moment and there is no reason to suppose that the institution will not continue to be a distinguished provider of higher education.

I think that everybody in the sector who is providing good-quality education, whether they are private or not for profit, would agree with that. However, what the regulations do not get to the heart of is how, if an institution is owned by a company or body overseas—it may be somebody who has taken the entire institution into private ownership—the OfS will be confident that it can make sure that the institution complies with the conditions of registration. An institution may change hands regularly—I give the example of the University of Law, which in the three years after it moved from being not for profit to being a for-profit company changed hands twice. How in that situation will we operate if we find that students are in effect left without not only the institution in which they enrolled but any clearly identifiable body to which they can have recourse and which the OfS can—bluntly—bring to court and demand that it do what it should do?

This is a major issue. The amendment would make sure that there was a body to which students and the Government could address themselves if a catastrophic event, which I am sure would be extremely rare, occurred. Setting up a subsidiary company in this country is generally not a very complicated or time-consuming affair. It cannot be beyond the power of the Government and it would not distort the underlying objective of the Bill to ensure that any institution offering higher education to students receiving loans subsidised by the taxpayer is clearly identifiable in the case of students being left without an education and creditors being left without obvious recourse.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 423 in my name. The question is about grants to the OfS for set-up and running costs, but there is the additional possibility, picked up in the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, that there may be other aspects and bright ideas that come to mind about how these charges might be recouped. The amendment asks whether or not there are tight guidelines available which would restrict the ability of the OfS to raise funds in a broader sense other than specifically for set-up and running costs. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

The point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, in her opening remarks on Amendment 420 is important, because we still worry a bit about what the nature of the beast called “OfS” is. Is it a regulator? It has been said that it is, and if it is, does it fall under the Regulators’ Code? I think I heard the Minister say on a previous amendment that it did not qualify to be considered within the code of practice for regulators. But if that is so, why call it a regulator? It will cause confusion and doubt if, in the public mind, it is a regulator for the sector but in fact it is not because it does not fulfil the criteria that would normally apply to other regulators. As the Minister said, these are not unhelpful comments in relation to regulator practice. They would clarify a lot of the uncertainty we have been experiencing in terms of how the regulator will operate. It might be that there is a case for it, even though it was not intended.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, has pointed out a number of times that there are other statutory provisions and considerations that might bear on how this Bill is constructed and issues relating to it. It is wise to have a wider net on these matters than simply to focus on the wording of the Bill. If there are other considerations that we ought to be aware of, it would be helpful if the Minister could respond, making quite clear what it is that drives the determination that the regulatory code does not apply in this area, even though some of the factors might be helpful and effective in terms of how it discharges its responsibilities.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I want to repeat what has been said by a large number of people in the Committee this afternoon about the issue of fees paid and how this is looked at and moderated. It seems fundamental to the future of the relationship between the regulator and the sector. An awful lot of what one gets from reading the Bill is the sense that they will be at odds—that the regulator is there to punish, to force, to fine and to search. Ultimately, that is completely destructive. The most destructive thing of all will be if people are fighting constantly over the nature of fees, what is legitimate and what is not.

Therefore, rather than repeating comments that I made in connection with an earlier amendment, I simply say how fundamentally important this issue is and how very much I hope that the Government will look carefully at the structures that are being set up. Fees and payments go to the heart of everything. As a policy researcher, “follow the money” is always what I say to myself. It would be very helpful if the Minister were able to assure us that, following this House’s deliberations on the Bill, that is one of the things that the Government will look at in terms of other legislation and statutory requirements, and that they will look at how, going forward, the OfS will interact with the sector in a way that is mutually beneficial rather than being made up of constant arguments and turf wars.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I strongly support what my noble friend Lady Brown said. Up until now, higher education has been fortunate in that it has had relatively few different regulatory authorities. The OfS will be quite different from anything that we have had before.

I refer to other sectors. I personally know the social care sector quite well. Those of us who have worked with or in this sector or the health sector, for example, know that, when you have more than one regulator, if they overlap or if it is not really clear who is responsible for what, you get regulatory and expenditure creep. This is not necessarily what the regulators mean—at least, not at the top level—but it is very much the experience that one has. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to this earlier in our deliberations. He talked about the problems that you could have in the health sector as a result of Monitor thinking that bringing institutions together was not a good idea when other people thought it was.

This is a probing amendment to ask for clarity, if not total simplicity, because there are very real costs when a sector does not have it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I apologise to the Minister. I was watching a figure behind who seemed to be moving towards an upright position and therefore might speak. If he is not I will carry on.

This is an interesting amendment and I am glad that it has been raised in the form that it has. We cover a number of points every time we debate this, but here is a question that cannot be ducked. The reality is that universities have to face a number of different regulators already. Those that are charities obviously have the Charity Commission as their regulator. Then there are those that are established as companies. As we have heard, many higher education providers have the permission of the Secretary of State to use “university” in their title or, even if they do not, are subject to anything that may be required under the Companies Acts. Many will have a variety of regulators; it is not unknown to have companies that are also charities. There are also bodies that are not for profit—corporations that are subject to the Companies Acts, but in a different way from those that are set up for profit.

However, I think the main purpose was to try to untangle the relationship between the CMA—a recent entry to this area—and the universities. It is a little surprising that the CMA has entered this area rather late given that it stated recently that providers of higher education that now come within its scope are subject to the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008; the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013; the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, for contracts concluded prior to 1 October 2015; and Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. That Act went through your Lordships’ House just over a year ago and included the application of consumer rights to public bodies such as institutions of higher education. It was amended during its passage through the House.

As I think is well known, the CMA has carried out a preliminary investigation into the new responsibilities that it has taken on in the last 18 months, and has obtained undertakings from more than a few universities to secure improvements to their terms and/or practices. It has written to all higher education providers, drawing the findings of the compliance review to their attention, and asking them to review and revise their practices and terms, as necessary, to ensure compliance with consumer protection law.

Where will this wave of regulatory practice, which is sweeping in with unforeseen and possibly unpleasant purposes, stop? I do not object to the CMA’s engagement or to anything that raises standards and keeps public bodies moving forward. However, there will be regulatory overload, as has been mentioned. We must be very careful to guard against that. The way most sectors operate in the event of overlapping regulators is to obtain a memorandum of understanding between the principal regulator—or in this case regulators—and the one closest to the bodies concerned. If the OfS is to be a regulator, we will need to know how this will operate in practice. It is welcome news that the Bill team is considering whether to engage more directly with the Regulators’ Code, as that would solve a lot of problems.

Before we proceed further with the Bill, we should be told exactly what the boundary between the CMA and the OfS, as envisaged, is. Indeed, it would be helpful to be informed of the boundary between the Charity Commission and the Registrar of Companies, if that is relevant. We should also probe a little further whether it is envisaged that a memorandum of understanding between these regulators will be drawn up to protect the provision we are discussing. If so, what timescale applies to that? Could that be provided by Report, at least in draft form, so that we can discuss it further?

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, happy new year, and a particular welcome to our respected guest standing at the Bar, who for those of your Lordships who were not present at Second Reading set a new record for MPs standing listening to debates. I gather he is here again to do a repeat performance. We should welcome his interest and his commitment to this issue, which I know is shared by so many Members of the House. I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden, Lady Wolf and Lady Brown, for joining me and supporting Amendment 1. I look forward to hearing their comments and those of other noble Lords across the Committee who have indicated to me that they support the amendment.

I declared my interests in higher education during the excellent Second Reading debate we held in the Chamber last month. Even if I had not been to a university, never worked in the university sector or not had my children educated in UK universities, I would have wanted to engage with the Bill because our excellent university sector—currently the second most successful higher education system in the world, with four universities ranked in the top 10—faces substantial challenges in the years ahead. It could, of course, be improved and it could, of course, be more innovative, and we support both those aims, but it also needs to be supported and protected, particularly if we go ahead with a hard Brexit, as now seems inevitable.

The abiding sense I have from our Second Reading debate is that the Bill fails to understand the purposes of higher education. I suggest that without defining these important institutions, there is a danger that the new regulatory architecture, the new bodies and the revised research organisation will do real and permanent damage. Universities across the world have multiple and complex roles in society, and there is no doubt that we all gain from that. They come in all sizes, and that too is good. They are at their best when they are autonomous, independent institutions which have the freedom to develop a range of missions and practices, while at the same time being public institutions, serving the knowledge economy and the knowledge society as well as being tools of economic progress and social mobility. They use the precious safe harbour of academic freedom to seek truth wherever it is to be found and publish it for all to see and discuss. They transmit and project values of openness, tolerance, inquiry and a respect for diversity that are the key to civilisation in an increasingly globalised world.

The purpose of the amendment is simple. The Bill before us does not define a university, and we think it will be improved if it does so. Our amendment does not simply itemise some of the core functions of a university, though it does that too, but also scopes out a university’s role, with its implicit ideals of responsibility, engagement and public service. A characteristic of all these functions is the expectation that universities take the long-term view and nurture a long-term stake in their local communities and wider society; that they embed scholarship and original and independent inquiry into their activities; and that they demonstrate a sustained commitment to serving the public good through taking up a role as critic and as the conscience of society.

I am confident that there is support for this approach across the House, based on the real sense of disappointment at the lack of ambition that the Bill currently exhibits. I hope the Government will feel able to accept the amendment. I say to the Minister that if he were minded to do so, not only would he improve the Bill but he would be signalling a willingness to listen to all the expertise, experience and wisdom that this House possesses and give us hope that he wished to use that for the benefit of this important sector and of the country as a whole. If he does not feel able to accept the amendment as it stands, perhaps he could offer to take it back and bring it back in an improved version on Report. If he did this, we would of course be very willing to work with him on how to improve the text—we have no pride of ownership.

I have to warn him, though, that if he does not want to engage as I have outlined, he will have to explain to this House what it is he cannot accept about specifying that universities have a secure and valued place in our society, and why he has difficulty in confirming that our universities should have statutory rights to institutional autonomy, academic freedom and freedom of speech. He will have to explain why he disagrees with his right honourable friend the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, who is standing at the Bar, who said in response to questions in Committee in the other place:

“At its most literal, a university can be described as a provider of predominantly higher education that has got degree-awarding powers and has been given the right to use the university title. That is the most limited and literal sense. If we want a broader definition, we can say that a university is also expected to be an institution that brings together a body of scholars to form a cohesive and self-critical academic community that provides excellent learning opportunities for people, the majority of whom are studying to degree level or above. We expect teaching at such an institution to be informed by a combination of research, scholarship and professional practice. To distinguish it from what we conventionally understand the school’s role to be, we can say that a university is a place where students are developing higher analytical capacities—critical thinking, curiosity about the world and higher levels of abstract capacity in their thinking. In brief, that is my answer to what a university is”.—[Official Report, Commons, Higher Education and Research Bill Committee, 15/09/16; col. 271.]

I confess to a little plagiarism in drafting my amendment, which I acknowledge is clearly based on that Minister’s approach, which is the correct one. I beg to move.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, the Bill we are debating today is an enormously important one. I declare an interest as a full-time academic at King’s College London.

The Government are creating the environment in which universities will operate and thrive or decline over many years, probably decades, and are changing it profoundly. Because a country’s universities and the nature of those universities are so central to what a country is—to its values, politics, culture, research and innovation—the Bill is truly important to the whole nation. Yet, curiously, the Bill has nothing to say about universities, as you will find if you have a quick search of the document. It says quite a lot about the university title, and at one point it refers to unauthorised degrees at,

“a university, college or other body”,

by grant, but that is it. Otherwise it refers consistently to “providers”.

Clearly, the Government do not think that the term “university” is meaningless. If it were, neither the Government nor higher education providers nor universities would be so occupied with the university title.

When I dug around a bit, I found that previous legislation also has extraordinarily little to say on the subject. The 1992 higher education Act refers simply to use of the name “university” in the title of an institution, and informs us hopefully that, if the power to change the name is exercisable with the consent of the Privy Council, it may be exercised, with that consent,

“whether or not the institution would apart from this section be a university”.

There is nothing more on what a university is. The Minister has kindly confirmed, in replies to Written Questions that the term is not defined in legislation but is a “sensitive” word under company law, which means that you need permission from the Secretary of State and a non-objection letter before you can use it in a business or company title.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I agree that the Office for Students is a very strange name for this body. I take this opportunity to remind anybody in the House who does not already know how very opposed to much of what it is going to do most of our students are, and publicly so. Although the automatic response one gets when this is pointed out is, “Oh, they just don’t want their fees put up”, that is not the sole thing they are complaining about—not at all. I also take this opportunity to put on record my appreciation of the University of Warwick student union, with which I have no connection whatever, which wrote an extremely well-thought-out critique of the Bill back in June, which was the first thing to alert me to many of the things that I have become very concerned about since. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that this is not an appropriate title and it would be very good if we could come up with another—but I do not think I will be collecting his champagne.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, of course the serious side to the light-hearted comments is that the name will conceal as much as it will reveal about what is going on here. I understand entirely my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s wish to raise this in a relatively light-hearted way and I do not want to be a party pooper but we need a lot more certainty about what exactly this new architecture, which was one of the great calling cards of the Bill when it was first introduced, is actually going to do and deliver.

A number of amendments further down the list will bear on this and we may well need to return to the name once—and only once—we have decided what we are going to have. For instance, we are now told that the Office for Fair Access will have a slightly different role in government amendments due to be discussed on the next day in Committee. That will change the nature of what the OfS does because, if the government amendments are accepted, it will not be allowed to delegate powers that would normally be given to the Office for Fair Access to anybody else, and it will have to ensure that the director of the Office for Fair Access has a particular role to play in relation to access agreements that are created under that regime. In that sense, the power of the OfS as originally conceived was already diluted at the Government’s own behest. We need to think that through before we make a final decision in this area.

The question of how registration is to take place is a quasi-regulatory function. We have an elephant parading around the Bill—it is supposed to walk around in a room but perhaps we ought not to extend the metaphor too far—in the role of the CMA, to which I hope the Minister will refer. If we are talking about regulatory functions, we need to understand better and anticipate well where the CMA’s remit stops and starts. The Minister was not on the Front Bench when the consumer affairs Act was taken through Parliament last year, but that Act is the reason why the CMA now operates in this area. It is extracting information and beginning to obtain undertakings from higher education providers regarding what they will and will not do in the offers they make through prospectuses, the letters sent out under the guise of UCAS, the obligations placed thereby on the students who attend that institution and the responsibilities of the institution itself. I do not wish to go too deep into it at this stage because there will be other opportunities to do so, but until we understand better the boundaries between the Office for Students and the CMA, it will be hard to know what regulatory functions will remain with the OfS and what name it would therefore be best put under. “Office” is common to many regulators but the letters in acronyms can also be changed.

We are back to where we were on the last group: we are not yet sure what the assessment criteria and regimes will be, but perhaps we know more about the criteria than the regime. It is one thing if a committee is to be established with responsibility for assessing the fitness to be on the register and the quality of the teaching as provided. But if an independent body were established and called the quality assurance office or some such similar name, as it would be under a later amendment, it would be doing a lot of the work currently allocated to the Office for Students. I do not have answers to any of these points. I am sure that the Minister will give us some guidance but it would be helpful, when he is ready and able to do so, if he set out in a letter exactly what he thinks the architecture might look like and what the justification therefore is for the name.

The most poignant point was that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden: that an Office for Students without student representation on it seems completely bonkers. I do not understand why the Government continue to move down this path. The amendment brought in on Report in the other place was one of sorts to try to move towards that. But it is a measure of the Government’s inability to grasp the issues here in a firm and convincing way that the person who is expected to occupy that place at the Office for Students, as provided for by the amendment, is somebody able to represent students. It is not necessarily a student, which seems a little perverse. I put it no more strongly than that.

Given that the current draft arrangements in the higher education sector for obtaining metrics relating to the grading of teaching quality in institutions has five students on the main committee and two or three students allocated to each of the working groups set up to look at individual institutions, there is obviously a willingness at that level to operate with and be engaged with students. Why is that not mirrored in the Office for Students? Regarding further use, it is really important that we get that nailed down. If it were a genuinely student-focused body—a provision which many governing bodies have—then the Office for Students might well be the right name for it. But until those questions are answered, I do not understand why the Committee would not accept my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s sensible suggestion.