Scotland Bill

It is an interesting suggestion and if I thought it was correct I might defer consideration of my amendment until then as I would be able to get a majority quite easily, even if I just voted for it myself. The noble Lords, Lord Hannay, Lord Sutherland and Lord Foulkes, have added their names to Amendment 1A. This is an historic occasion and there will be few occasions in this House when these four names together appear on one amendment. It emphasises the nature of this amendment and the nature of the injustice it seeks to deal with. The amendment simply says that residents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland should be treated in exactly the same way by the Scottish Parliament as other members of other European states. One would assume this matter was completely uncontroversial. The amendment is grouped with Amendment 59, which provides for the Scottish universities to be consulted and for a delaying implementation provision in order to deal with any administrative difficulties that might arise. I was acutely conscious of this issue when I ran at the beginning of this year for rector at the University of St Andrews, I regret to say unsuccessfully. I was beaten by a better candidate who had more time to commit to a great university. I attended the University of St Andrews with Alex Salmond. He ran the SNP and I ran the Tories. We had 1,300 members; he had three. It has changed round since those days. One of the characteristics of the University of St Andrews was that lots of students came from the rest of the United Kingdom and that is still the case today. What outraged me was discovering that students sitting side by side in classes are expected, in the case of those who live in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, to pay £36,000 in fees while those who live in Scotland or Poland or Germany or Italy or anywhere else in the European Union pay nothing at all. That is an utterly divisive and wrong policy. It has been exacerbated by the increase in fees and by the fact that Scottish universities have four-year degrees. This amendment seeks to create the circumstances which would exist in Scotland if it were independent. If we had an independent Scotland, it would not be allowed under European law to discriminate in this way against those people who live in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I know that some people—not everyone, including me—have received directly a brief from the universities in Scotland which have expressed concern about this amendment. My noble friend Lord Vallance has made representations to me that if it were passed it would mean that there would be administrative chaos for the student intake arriving in September, which is why the amendment allows for some delay while this matter is sorted out. The Scottish Government have been saying that if English and Welsh and Irish students—and that means people who are resident in England, Wales and Ireland; they might well be Scottish students whose families have moved to other parts of the United Kingdom—could go to universities in Scotland for free, there would be a flood across the border. This is the most disingenuous and dishonest argument. Ireland has no fees. People can go from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland and they deal with it by having a quota for the number of students that they will accept. If it is suggested that quotas would be wrong, there is already a quota in operation. There is a quota set by the Scottish Government on the number of students who come from Scotland and from other European Union countries. To suggest that they could not have people resident in the rest of the United Kingdom coming on the same terms as those from Germany and elsewhere is, to say the least, misleading. My noble friend Lord Sassoon and I have disagreed about the tax provisions in this Bill which say that if one Government make a change to the tax base the other Government have to compensate them for it. So why does this not apply to higher education in this case? There is an issue about funding. Just over 5,000 students are affected by this and the cost is of the order of £24 million. The block grant is of the order of £28 billion. My noble friend Lord Baker was telling me that the Scottish Government got a big increase in their funding as a result of the marvellous work he is doing with technical teaching in universities. When he went to Scotland, he found that it had been spent on something else. The Barnett formula, which we will discuss again later this evening, provides for funding which is broadly getting on for 20 per cent more per head than is spent in England. It is an outrage to tell students living in Wales and Northern Ireland and England, who are contributing to that extra funding that they cannot go for free.