Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Kerslake

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 16th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has said. I declare an interest as chair of the board of Sheffield Hallam University and the chair of Peabody. An explanation for that will follow

There is a cautionary tale here in relation to housing associations and the story around their public body status. For a long period of time they were regarded as not public bodies and therefore able to exercise borrowing and take forward proposals outside of the public sector. The effect of successive changes of regulations and controls on housing associations then led to a reclassification by the ONS as public bodies. As a consequence we are now in a process of seeking to deregulate housing associations to move them out of that situation. We do not want to go through the same process for universities. We should proceed with care on this issue.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I always proceed with care. I am not afraid of that sort of gibe. We could get ourselves in an awful tangle if we start following the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, down this route. It is a familiar theme that he runs with all the time whenever he gets close to something he does not want to do. We must all be careful not to have too many loads on us. We can worry too much about form and not enough about content and I want to challenge him on that. I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is saying on this, but these bodies are, if you stand a little apart from the close intricacies of how they operate, performing a public function, a function that is valued by the public. I have said already that they are public bodies but not public sector bodies, but as the noble Lord said, there is an issue about FoI and the implications around that. We have got to find a balancing point on that.

Let us park the philosophy for a second and return to the substance of the original amendment. Our Amendment 111 is a probing amendment to try to get a little further on this, because I could not reconcile the drafting in the original Bill with what I thought would be the sorts of issues reflective of the health or otherwise of the sector and would be required as mandatory transparency conditions. The obvious point about using the existing equality legislation occurred to others who are more versed in these issues than I am. I tabled a probing amendment on those lines to try to get that out and it has revealed an interesting topic. I do not know where we go with this. I understand the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, gave us an insight into and which we will need to reflect on.

Three things occur to me. It was rightly pointed out that our Amendment 111 would delete the socioeconomic background requirement in Clause 9(3). There was a reason for our madness on that point in that it seemed a wide-ranging issue on which to request transparency. We are talking about mandatory transparency and socioeconomic background is a term of art, not a term of science, although one could get close to it from a number of directions. It is so imprecise as not to have a particular value. Moreover, ethnicity is not the same as race and the gender of individuals is a multiple, complex issue. These issues are raised within the Equality Act and we have to be much more subtle about how we approach them. I was looking more at the detail and working back from that.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Kerslake

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake]

My Lords, I express my thanks for the support that I received from all parts of the House for Amendment 65. I am very aware of the hour and will not rehearse every argument made, but I will pick up on one point, which is that this amendment is not in itself a guarantee that Ministers or the Office for Students would act properly, but it would help. This is the crucial point for me. I am disappointed with the Minister’s response. I see this as a practical, simple and necessary amendment to secure institutional autonomy. Just to be clear, the amendment states:

“The Secretary of State, in issuing guidance and directions, and the OfS, in performing its functions, have a duty to uphold the principle of institutional autonomy”.

It is hard to see any situation in which that would lead to greater intervention rather than less. In the circumstances we are in, I shall not press the amendment. I hope there will be an opportunity for further conversation, and I give notice that I will return to this issue at a later stage.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I thank all noble Lords for their contribution to this rather extended debate. I prefaced my opening remarks by saying that this is a complicated group, and it certainly proved to be so. We have got there, but by a rather circuitous route, and I am a bit confused about some of the things that the Minister said when responding. I am sure a lot of us will want to read Hansard very carefully.

It is clear that the position that we are moving towards—it is clear to me and I am going to advance this as a thesis as I withdraw my amendment—is that we want a healthy system of higher education provision in this country. There is no doubt or dissent about that, but it is not clear who decides which institutions that are providing higher education are going to be universities and what the criteria are. The university title follows a particular process which we have discussed and we know about, but who does it? Is it Ministers or civil servants, or is there another body yet to be set up? I would like the Minister to write to us setting out very clearly the structure he has identified today. Who maintains the register? The Minister said that it will be not a statutory register but a voluntary register. I agree that the carrots and sticks are very substantial, but it is a bit of a strange decision to have a regulator—the Office for Students—that does not have a regulatory function because it is voluntary. That needs to be unpicked.

We need to know who assesses the criteria under which higher education providers get on to the register, who assesses the threshold standards for degree provision that they are obliged to have, and who assesses the quality of the degrees they subsequently grant. There are amendments about this later on, but we must also ask who regulates the body appointed as the regulator for the system. Is there another body that we do not know about? A lot of this will be answered by transparency, and I would be grateful if the Minister wrote to us about that.

I was asked three specific questions that I am not going to be able to answer, but I will record them so noble Lords know that I have them in mind. I do not understand the issue about where an institution needs to be located, but I think it is intimately connected with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, about who gets the benefit of the subsidy and the tax provisions that are available. It would be quite inappropriate for a body to be registered as a university within the United Kingdom and to receive tax benefits if it is not also providing a public benefit. It is obviously a circular argument; we are making the same point, and we need to have that bottomed out. I do not have a solution, and my amendment would not have taken us to that point. The situation needs to be looked at again.

The trustee model has served us well. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was not knocking it and recognises its value, but he wanted there to be other bodies such as enterprise institutions. I would like to see the evidence for that. He has no responsibility in this respect, and it is about time he told us where he thinks all these brilliant institutions are. Comments were also made on this side about that issue. I am very sceptical about whether that would be worth while, but it is a fair point to question.

My noble friend Lady Cohen and others on our side need to resolve our differences about this issue. I am not against an institution making a profit, provided that the arrangements under which it is made are transparent. Transparency is the issue, and I am sure we will come back to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.