My Lords, I intervene very briefly to say that, at the end of the deliberations on this Bill, and on this important aspect of the Bill, we have ended up with a more rigorous, more transparent and more demanding regime for alternative providers in higher education than we have ever had before. I regretted that it was not possible to get legislation during the previous Parliament that would have gone alongside the initiatives that we took on alternative providers, but we certainly have a very significant regulatory regime in place now.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has been one of the people pressing for this, but I just question one point that she made in her otherwise admirable remarks. She said that the Home Office had closed down lots of higher education institutions because they were bogus and did not meet proper standards. I think they were colleges, which is an unregistered name—you can call yourself a college—and there were people who were getting into Britain saying that they were going to study at colleges. There has always been a regime for validating degree-awarding powers and, of course, for getting the university title. I think it would be very dangerous in this House if we were to get the idea that there had been lots of bogus higher education institutions, which I do not think has been case; the problem was colleges. Even there, the Home Office occasionally got overexuberant—at least one college that had won the
Queen’s award for export was subsequently closed down—but it was essentially trying to stop people coming to study for a vocational qualification in a college environment.
Setting that specific point aside, we now have a very rigorous regime and I hope that we will now see practised the spirit of what the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said; we need innovation in higher education in this country. Although it is great when existing providers innovate, we know that in many sectors the best way to get innovation is for new people to come in and do things differently. I hope we can all agree that, especially with this regime in place, we can give a very warm welcome to new higher education institutions and new universities in this country.