My Lords, I can probably do this quite briefly. These are very helpful amendments, which illustrate an extremely important point. To work out why or how the Bill will be useful or effective, it is important to understand what academics do—what life on the ground is actually like and what having a career entails. I want to follow my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury’s earlier comments, but I think that is for a later debate. If academics want to pursue a career, there are facts on the ground that cannot be overlooked, and these amendments address them.
There is a longish history to this; I must confess to having my fingerprints on parts of the REF at different times in the past, so I want to acknowledge that I have probably contributed to a problem. Today, if you want to make progress, it is entirely commonplace in universities to expect that, in the last period of assessment of research, you will have produced at least three articles in reputable referee journals. If you have not done so, you will not be promoted and if you do not have tenure, you will probably not survive at all. It is imperative. It is a gating process about which this Grand Committee will do nothing, because it is not in our power, but that is how it happens.
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My noble friend Lord Sikka has illustrated an important point about the final element of this. If we are serious about the contestation of ideas, then people are plainly going to have to raise research money to do the research and contest ideas. But they do it in a real world with real constraints and if they do not meet the criteria I have mentioned, their careers are over.
It may well be that in these amendments we could set out what higher education institutions may not do to impede those people even further. I have a suspicion that we may prove unsuccessful, but not in terms of higher education institutions or the research councils; it may be that the people who purchase research will go and purchase it elsewhere rather than run risks of another kind. I have seen that happen as well; it happens in pharmacology quite a lot.
If we think that we can have an impact on it, we plainly have to address the ways in which freedom of speech can be impeded for every academic who thinks that they have a career which involves original research. If we ignore it and it remains the lacuna that has been described, then we have basically ignored one of the key drivers of either academic freedom or impediments to it in our university sector.