Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, for what reason universities have autonomy over the procedure for charging application fees at postgraduate level.
Universities are, historically, autonomous institutions, and they may determine their own procedures, within the law. The Secretary of State has no current legal power to intervene in the charging of application fees. In general, the freedom of higher education providers to determine the criteria for the admission of students and how they are applied is recognised in Section 2, and elsewhere, in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.