I rise to speak to our amendments, but also to comment on others, including the Minister’s new clause 1. Let me start with that and the Minister’s other remarks to make a general observation.
Of course we welcome the move to include a student representative on the body, as has been described. I have to say, however, that it is relatively thin gruel in comparison with the range of positive amendments that would involve employees and students in respect of some of the key issues that the OFS will have to face, some of which we debated in Committee. If the Government want to calm suspicions about the OFS, they need to do more to ensure that as a body, it has sufficient powers directly defined in the Bill. I have always said that we have to work on the assumption that we will have the worst and the naughtiest Secretaries of State, not necessarily the best ones and not necessarily the best Minister with responsibility for universities. That means that we need to build things directly on the face of the Bill. We have not had the ability to do that, and it is not helpful that the ability to tease out these issues should be confined to one day’s discussion of 113 clauses and 12 schedules. Other Members who might have been able to attend today know perfectly well that many of the issues that need to be discussed will have to be dealt with in the other place.
Let me begin by speaking briefly to our amendments, particularly those relating to staff and student involvement. Amendment 37 deals with consultation regarding ongoing registration conditions. It might sound very techy, and I know that there is some consultation with bodies or informal groups representing HE staff and students at the moment. Some of the new providers that the Minister wants to see coming into the marketplace may be relatively small, and may have relatively informal groupings, so it is important that the position of their staff and students is taken into account.
Let me move on to amendments 36 and 48. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) has already mentioned the latter. The Government must get into the right mind-set with HE and realise that it is not all simply about vice-chancellors, however excellent they are. It is not simply about business managers either, however excellent they are. It is about the support staff, who live in the local communities where the universities are situated; and it is also about excellent teaching, social mobility and student choice. Sometimes cleaning staff can be the first point of contact for live-in students who face isolation and need someone to talk to.
The Government need a cultural step-change in the way they address these issues, and should not put some of these groups in as an afterthought. We believe that these modest amendments would take us down that route.
In Committee, we talked a great deal about the whole issue of social mobility. The Minister waxed lyrical on the subject—genuinely, I believe—but those who want to walk the walk must do something about putting the beef on to the talk. That is why we tabled amendment 38, which
“would make access and participation plans mandatory for all higher education providers.”
The Government have plenty of angles on the Bill, but two that are raised continually are competition and consumers’ rights. In fact, competition must go hand in hand with consumers’ rights. I am perfectly happy for the pool of new providers to be expanded—I spent 20 years working for an organisation, the Open University, which was once a new provider—but I am anxious to ensure that, if there is to be a competitive market, providers bring to the table a proper sense of the responsibilities that they will have to meet. That is why it is so important to ensure that an access and participation plan is at the heart of what the new providers do. There may be circumstances in which the numbers that that produces are relatively modest, but if the Government want the process to go ahead, providers must accept those responsibilities.
It is in the same spirit of inclusion that we tabled amendment 39, which
“would include the number of people with disabilities and care leavers, as well as the age of applicants, in the published number of applications.”
A number of Members have emphasised the importance of the issue of mature and older students, and indeed part-time students, about which I shall say more when I talk about new clause 15. Amendment 39 demonstrates that emphasis. If we want to have realistic expectations of where those groups are going and know what the Government need to do—and this has already been raised by several Members in the context of international students—we must have that evidence, and the amendment stresses the need to broaden the parameters.
New clause 4, which would establish a “Committee on Degree Awarding Powers and University Title”, is actually modelled on provisions in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which we want to passport into this Bill. The Government, rather curiously, do not want such a committee, although one might have thought that they would welcome a backstop. After all, we know that Ministers are bedding down, inevitably slowly, in a new Department with further and higher education responsibilities. Again, the Government cannot be surprised if people think that they want as little outside scrutiny of the new providers as possible.
New clause 4—which, I might point out to the Minister, is supported by all the university groups that have spoken to us—was tabled because, as the Bill stands, the OFS could revoke degree-awarding powers or university title without consulting a committee. The current arrangements for conferring degree-awarding powers require HEFCE to seek the advice of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education—the Minister made great play of that—but it is vital for the OFS to seek advice from a designated quality body prior to any conferring of degree-awarding powers and/or university title.
Amendments 40 and 41 are designed to underline points that were raised by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) in a hugely important intervention about her own amendment 58. We need to shine a light on and distinguish between broad-based new providers and those that could go for opportunist, fast-buck courses, or those that are inefficiently structured or financed to do the things that my hon. Friend talked about. As she and others have said, there is huge concern in the HE sector about single-course universities. What has not been mentioned much—we talked about it in Committee—is the huge amount of public money that will go into those new providers, providing they jump through the hoops that the Government are putting in front of them. We contend that those hoops are inadequate. Because of that, we want to press the matter further. Amendment 40 requires the OFS to be assured about the maintenance of standards, students and the public interest before issuing authorisation to grant a degree. That is important. I give notice that we will press amendment 40 to a vote. Whatever the outcome, I assure the Minister that the issue is unlikely to go away and that he and his team will face further questions on it after the matter goes to the other place.
5.45 pm
I have spoken against something that the Government want to do. I want to speak now about new clause 15, which would set up a standing commission on the integration of higher education and lifelong learning, and to thank the Minister for the small but important movement there has begun to be in the Government on that issue and on the issue of part-time loans, which is being looked at and is an important part of that process. We should look—we discussed this at great length in Committee, so I will not go through all the statistics—at the dire situation that adult learners have been in since 2010 and the way in which so many of those learners have been disadvantaged, when we should be arranging for them to be reskilled and retrained to meet our economic and social objectives in the 21st century.
In a speech in the House of Lords, Lord Rees said that we needed to have a revolution in the way in which we formalise the system to more readily allow for transfers between institutions and between part-time and full-time study. The demand for part-time and distance learning will grow, speeded of course by the high fees now imposed on students at traditional residential university. Lord Rees, a former president of the Royal Society, is absolutely right. The time for action is now. That is why the Labour party and the Labour Front-Bench team have tabled that significant new clause. The standing commission on the integration of higher education and lifelong learning would set the course that was originally laid out by David Blunkett in “The Learning Age” Green Paper in 1998. That issue has been sadly side-lined until now, but lifelong learning and higher education are not a nice optional extra. They are fundamental to our economic productivity, to competing in a post-Brexit world, to our social cohesion, to rebuilding a belief in the value and dignity of work and to offering personal and practical fulfilment to ordinary working people and their families, opening doors to them—often opportunities have evolved for the middle classes and professional people —rather than their being stuck on the first rung of the ladder. That is what we want to do. We want to think about how we deliver these things locally and nationally.
We are not claiming that the structure that we want to put in the Bill is perfect. We have taken wide soundings from all sorts of groups—city and guilds, Unionlearn, the Open University, the Learning and Work Institute—and considered our own thoughts on these matters. I say to the Minister, “Go away, look at the new clause, which would do some of the things that you are talking about in terms of social mobility, and take it on board.” If the Government do not take it on board, we will do so; we will take it through to the House of Lords, we will take it out into the country, and we will put this issue of proper lifelong learning in higher and further education right at the top of the agenda.
On our amendments 46 and 47, much of what I would have said about why we need in particular to make sure the TEF is taken out of the hands of Whitehall and put far more centrally into the hands of Parliament have been illustrated in the excellent speech this afternoon from my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) with his interventions, the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) and others. We do not trust the Government with the TEF as it is because they have demonstrated ever since they introduced this Bill that whenever they had an opportunity to do something to keep control of the process and try and get things through that would not require legislation in detail, they have turned to the TEF as an automatic link with raising tuition fees. The Home Office has turned to the TEF, too, and is currently holding a sword of Damocles over the Government and all of us on the issue of international students. They have not turned to putting on the face of the Bill in any shape or form whether the TEF is going to be done on the basis of a whole university or school or subject area, and we have also heard from my hon. Friends of the many significant issues around the metrics in this area. It is a question of confidence and trust and parliamentary scrutiny, and that scrutiny is being denied under the present process.
My hon. Friends are right to say the vast majority of people in this country do not regard students as migrants, yet we could have a situation, as we have heard with the gold, silver and bronze issue, where these things are smuggled in, with dire consequences for our social cohesion, economic productivity and so many of the things we will need post-Brexit.
This move is vehemently opposed by the sector, and the Government seem to have managed to achieve an extraordinary conjunction in the way they brought the TEF forward by having annoyed and alarmed virtually every sector of the university world, whether it be the people employed in universities, those who study in them, those who manage them, the vice-chancellors who are at the head of them, or indeed their relatives, families and everybody else, who are now worried. We had a discussion about this in Committee, and the Minister talked about my views in I think about 2002 on teaching excellence. I have not changed my views on the importance of teaching excellence and a teaching excellence framework, but the teaching excellence framework which started out in this Bill as bad enough has now been malformed and deformed by the way in which it has been used, and is threatened to be used, to be not simply something that is completely useless but something that could be an absolute danger in all the ways I have described right at the heart of our university system.
We had to use some ingenuity to get even a discussion of the TEF in respect of the Bill, so cleverly had the Government gone about trying to keep it off the face of the Bill, but I am sure those issues around the TEF will be returned to, and with some significance and in no short order, when it goes to the other place. I therefore want to again place on record that we will be pressing our amendment 47 on the need for these measures to be continually subject to scrutiny by, and approval of, both Houses of Parliament to a vote.