Higher Education (Fee Limits and Student Support) (England) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 4 June be approved.

My Lords, we have all seen the devastating impact of Covid-19 around the world. Recovering from this will take time and Her Majesty’s Government are already providing an unprecedented set of measures to support the people of this country along the way. One such beneficiary of the support is our world-renowned higher education sector. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education announced a stabilisation package for the sector on 4 May. This included the introduction of temporary student number controls, which relate to the regulations that we are debating today. I thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee of your Lordships’ House for considering the draft regulations. I am pleased to see that one of its members, the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is taking part in our proceedings.

To understand why these regulations are necessary, we must look at the potential financial consequences of the pandemic on higher education providers, their staff and, of course, their students. For instance, in the 2018-19 academic year, tuition fees from international students accounted for around £7 billion of the sector’s income. Realising the risk that a sharp decline in international students might pose, many providers have already responded by attempting to recruit more domestic students than normally they would. Some issued a record number of unconditional offers to encourage students to study with them. While seeking to ensure their own financial stability is only natural, this strategy, if replicated widely, could have unfortunate consequences for the sector as a whole—providers and students alike.

I shall first spell out the consequences for providers. There is already a finite pool of prospective students, made smaller by a 1.5% decrease in the number of 18 year-olds this year compared with last. In these exceptional circumstances, an unusually high number of offers made by a provider may attract more students than normal to that provider, but, therefore, away from others which would normally have recruited them, and which could not absorb the associated loss of income. Repeated across the whole sector, this could place some providers at risk of collapse. That would destabilise the sector, threaten staff livelihoods and, of course, leave many students without a provider in the middle of their education.

That leads me to the consequences for the students themselves. Different providers, rightly, have different entry standards. Every student is unique, with different academic abilities and needs. A positive student experience is a vital and fundamental part of university life. It is to everyone’s benefit that there should be a range of providers, offering a range of different learning environments catering to different academic needs. The long-term consequences of the potential instability in the sector which we saw emerging earlier this year could far outweigh the short-term benefits to individual providers. It is for this reason, together with the need to avoid an unfair imbalance in public expenditure, that temporary number controls have been introduced, and that the associated regulations have been laid before your Lordships’ House to consider.

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

At end, insert “but that this House regrets that the draft Regulations reduce the funding available to English students studying at higher education institutions in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland; and calls on Her Majesty’s Government to provide emergency support for higher and further education institutions in order to help them respond to the COVID-19 pandemic”.

My Lords, first, I thank all the noble Lords who intend to take part in the debate. The seriousness of it is undoubtedly underlined by the stellar cast list joining us virtually today. I shall listen with care and interest to all comments made, not least because of the precarious financial position that the HE sector finds itself in during this crisis.

As noble Lords will no doubt note, as the Minister did, higher education institutions generate more than £95 billion a year for the UK economy and support more than 940,000 full-time jobs. They develop highly skilled people, drive business productivity, fuel economic growth, provide essential workers and conduct high-impact research to address global challenges—including, of course, Covid-19.

Ultimately, they create opportunities at home and strengthen the UK’s standing abroad. But as the Explanatory Memorandum states, coronavirus has placed significant financial strain on the higher education sector and poses a significant risk to those benefits. It is right that the Government take steps to mitigate this, but they need to be carefully thought through, consulted on and explained, and include a longer-term vision to help higher education institutions survive the next few months and thrive in the years to come.

As we have heard, this instrument is meant to include two measures. First, where an English provider has recruited more students than number controls allow, it reduces tuition fee limits for undergraduate courses in the following academic year. Universities UK has proposed a similar stability measure. However, the second measure is regrettable. It reduces the maximum tuition fee loan amount available to English students at institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for 2021-22 when number controls are not stuck to. So far, the Government have failed to provide a meaningful justification for the extension beyond England. We fear that any cap on English students attending non-English institutions will only add to the difficulty that universities face, as well as straining the devolution settlement in the UK. Therefore, our opposition is reflected in my amendment.

My Lords, this is one of those interesting documents that seems to have come out of the middle of nowhere, because four months ago nobody would have assumed we would be in this situation. The idea that you should stop universities that have better academic relations—based on either academic achievement or straightforward snob value—from hoovering up extra students seems quite reasonable. You should not be able to increase your numbers to the detriment of the rest of the sector.

There are one or two side issues here, and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, has raised a few of them. I should declare an interest—albeit one that is decreasing as time goes on—in that I went to a Scottish university, Aberdeen. Aberdeen proudly boasted that it had two universities when England had two universities. The question is: if we are starting to affect these institutions in the north, how are we going to compensate them? They are still part of the United Kingdom, and the interchange of students between the two nations does not do any harm to the relationship between the two states in most cases, although I can think of one or two people in my past where I suggest that was not the case. We need some clarity from the Government about what they are doing on this issue.

The issue of unconditional offers is coming up here. They do not enjoy a tremendously good reputation. Some sort of minimum standard has often been considered in education, and this might be a good time to bring it in. Unconditional offers stop people working and sometimes mean that they are not prepared for going forward. If we are prepared to do something to address that issue, it might be one small crumb of good to come out of this very unpleasant situation.

My Lords, with two grandchildren completing courses at English universities but living in Scotland, I take a particularly personal interest in this issue. We have to look very carefully at the regulations, which give considerable power to the Government. I understand why they are being introduced; we are living, as so many people have said so often, in unprecedented times. In my 50 years in Parliament there has been no situation remotely like the present one. However, disasters can also bring opportunities, and I hope that over the next year there will be a complete determination to sustain our universities, which include some of the finest in the world. Some of them are quite new, such as Lincoln, where I sit on the court.

At the same time, the present situation should give us an opportunity to re-evaluate, reshape and define. We must get away from the mindset that says that young people who go to university are a success and those who do not have somehow failed. With vocational courses, apprenticeships and institutions such as the former polytechnics, we have to look at what we can do to try to ensure that each and every one of our young people leaving school goes to the right institution and studies the right course for him or her, so that afterwards that young person can play a full part in our society, a part that is underlined by the very concept of vocation, whether someone is studying a higher academic subject at university or is practising one of the crafts. There are great challenges before us and we must be very careful that we rise to them.

My Lords, investment in education is essential for the future of our country. I fully understand the economic impact of Covid-19 on the national purse and the rationale of limiting the amount spent on student loans by limiting student numbers. However, the over-rigid application of the proposed caps could adversely affect those from deprived backgrounds trying to get a foot on the ladder to economic and social advancement. I believe that those in this category should be excluded from calculations on the proposed caps.

I am inclined to accept that the funding of English-domiciled students is not strictly a devolved matter. However, not having seen any figures on projected savings, I wonder whether it is really worth the upset, and the financial upset, caused.

There is a line in an English hymn that states:

“New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast with Truth.”

The Covid pandemic is an opportunity to look again at our national priorities. While I would put health and social care near the top, should we really be cutting and cropping vital services such as education, while spending billions on battleships and the like to fight 19th and 20th-century wars?

I draw attention to my declaration of interest. I support entirely the points made by my noble friend Lord Bassam, but want to put on record that I am sick and tired of hearing those who have benefited from higher education, and whose children have gone through or wish to go through higher education, denigrating it and suggesting that other people’s children should not.

It is time that the Government understood the catastrophic hit being perpetrated on the higher education sector. Yes, Universities UK was concerned about the smaller and more vulnerable institutions—I get that—but we need a major marketing programme supported by the Government, both nationally and internationally, and to recognise that mass unemployment among young people in the coming year will require us to open up those opportunities still further, not as an alternative to apprenticeships or the opportunity to take in-service training in jobs when they are available, but realising that those opportunities will be limited. Foundation and access courses encouraging young people who are capable of doing so to go to university therefore make social, cultural and economic sense. And of course, for international students who are absolutely crucial to the cross-subsidy of research, it is important to turn fine words into reality.

As the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said, there has been an unprecedented response by the Government to our economic and health challenge but that has not been true of the investment in and help to higher education. If we do not get this right, we will face a dual disbenefit—first, the impact of the geopolitical events and uncertainties of the moment, and secondly, a lack of recruitment at home, which would be bad for young people and disastrous for the university sector.

My Lords, I want to draw attention to the difficulty that some children of migrant families brought up in the UK are facing, which has the potential to become another Windrush-style scandal. It is only when these children are planning to go into higher education and start to fill out their UCAS forms that they realise that they do not have the right documentation. Those over the age of 18 could face the threat of deportation. This is because they came to the UK as young children on their parents’ passport, and grew up and went to school here, but when they try to fulfil their dream of going to university, they realise they do not have the necessary papers.

They are not British citizens or refugees and do not have indefinite leave to remain, so before filling out their UCAS forms, they have to apply for limited leave to remain—an immigration status that allows them to legally stay in the UK for a period. However, this could mean a wait of up to three years to process. To make matters worse, applicants for student finance need to have had lawful status in the UK for at least three years before the start of the academic year when their course begins.

It is an impossible situation. They can apply for limited leave to remain, if they have lived in the UK for seven years before their 18th birthday, but even if this legal status application is successful, they cannot work, yet they need money to reapply for legal status every two and a half years for 10 years paying around £2,000 each time until they eventually become eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

This Windrush-style scandal is causing much heartache, depression and anxiety. What are the Government doing to avoid this catastrophe unfolding and help these intelligent young people fulfil their dreams, which will benefit society in the long term?