My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for introducing this amendment and all the noble Lords who have spoken. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for sharing her experiences just then—horrific though one of them was. I am sure Oxford is duly proud of her now, and so it should be. Like her, I am not sure who should be blamed for my career—the institution where I did my first degree, the one that offered me a mid-career MBA or the one where I did my more recent theological training. Anyway, none of them can be suitably blamed.
In general, I am a big fan of data—any data, but especially robust data at scale. I like it being used to inform policy-making and am happy for it to be there as part of a feedback loop. So anything that can help universities get a richer picture of what happens to their graduates after they leave is probably a good thing—but that does not necessarily mean I want a straight line from that to the way the Government fund or regulate them.
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If we are going to get data, HMRC data on gross incomes is pretty solid. It is crude, but it is reliable and consistent. Certainly, I like the idea of any longitudinal dataset which might offer a counterpoint to collecting graduates’ own assessments of their jobs and income 15 months after they leave college. I recently discovered that the OfS has a new measure which crunches together continuation and completion data with graduate outcomes to project the chance of a new student sticking the course, getting a degree and then landing a job that the OfS classes as professional. It named it the PROjected Completion and Employment from Entrant Data measure, or Proceed, an acronym which must have made somebody at OfS very happy. I get that as a prospective student I would want to know what graduates of my favoured university went on to do, but even if there were a really reliable single predictor, no metric will tell me what is going to happen to me. Given the marked differences in labour market outcomes by sex, ethnicity and disability never mind intention, all such data needs a health warning. However, I will not go back there.
The second effect of this amendment would be to enable universities to communicate with their graduates via the Student Loans Company to allow them to encourage lifelong learning. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the most likely immediate users would be development offices and alumni
associations, but I acknowledge that one of the most interesting aspects of lockdown has been how many people I have spoken to who have been doing online learning of all kinds, from friends taking art history courses out of interest to young people taking free MOOC courses at Yale to boost their employability. There is a rich pool of learning opportunities out there at the moment.
The idea of enabling NEST to communicate with graduates via the Student Loans Company is interesting. I can see why the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, chose NEST. It has a public service obligation and the Secretary of State is the settlor of the NEST scheme. Obviously in terms of timing, this amendment is designed to nudge graduates into paying into a pension at the point when suddenly they are about stop paying off their loans, so perhaps they could be encouraged to keep paying the 9% or 15% but to redirect it to a pension instead of a loan. However, this amendment would have them doing that at the 28th or 30th year of repayments which under Plan 4 would make most of those students about 50 and upwards, although if Augar gets his way they would be nearer 60. However, it is worth remembering that the value of small contributions made earlier in one’s working life is enormous. The Minister is bound to have lots of reasons, as indeed may I, why these things are impossible or merely undesirable, but if they ever do it, I suggest they think about the optimal time to target communications to graduates.
My other hesitations are ones which the Minister will anticipate. Historically, things have not always gone entirely smoothly at the Student Loans Company, so we would need to know it could handle this without putting the core business under pressure. Data security is a real consideration. Also, is there a risk that if the Student Loans Company becomes a post box for others—initially universities or NEST, but who knows after that?—it may not stop there Will the Treasury see a chance for it to raise money by being a commercial gateway to a lucrative market of graduates, and does being a post box at all risk diluting the importance of communications from the SLC?
I realise that I am being difficult and looking for problems. That is kind of my job: I am in the Opposition, and perhaps I have been there too long. However, as always, the noble Lord is thinking creatively, and I will be very interested to hear what the Minister makes of his suggestions.