Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps, if any, they have taken to ensure that the Office for Students’ regulatory approach is supportive of start-up and scale-up businesses and offers a stable environment for long-term investment.

The Office for Students (OfS) considers financial sustainability and business plans when assessing providers during registration.

The OfS is planning further work on minimising regulatory burden on all providers, including those who are new and/or small, to support them to focus on high quality teaching and research. More detail on this, together with its regulatory approach, will be published later this month in the OfS’s new strategy for 2022 to 2025.

The OfS also currently minimises the impact of its regulatory approach on micro and new providers by limiting its registration fees for those providers.

The Higher Education (HE) (Registration Fees) (England) Regulations 2021 continue to contain a micro-entity exemption. This exemption protects the very smallest HE providers (employing up to 50 people) by providing a 100% registration fee exemption.

These most recent regulations also retain protections for new providers in relation to registration fees: the regulations continue to allow for the OfS to charge reduced fees to those new institutions who decide to register with it.