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Queen’s Speech

I shall focus on just a fraction of the responsibilities carried with such brio by the Lord President and say a word or two about higher education and research. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, made some very important remarks about that subject in relation to national competitiveness. I declare an interest in that I was, for 10 years until this summer, the chancellor of Newcastle University, and I am still the chancellor of Oxford University, where my term of office expires at the same time as I do. I missed the Statement that the Lord President made on higher education at the beginning of the month. I was in New Zealand, lecturing at universities there. However, I read his statement in the Official Report and was grateful for the extensive way in which he quoted a speech that I had made on higher education at an earlier date in this House. Apart from his usual charity, why did he quote from my speech? I suspect that it was because I pointed out how much higher education had been underfunded in the 1980s. I painted a fairly bleak picture of the consequences of that underfunding. It is perhaps another example of how in this House we move such a distance beyond political ambition. Presumably, the same is conceivably true of the Lord President, who is very unfairly compared from time to time with Pompey, the great warden of land and sea. Just assuming for a moment that he is prepared to put politics on one side and consider this subject with a degree of honesty, I shall concede at the outset that higher education today is better funded than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. However, nobody should pretend that Labour Ministers have been tooth fairies. If we compare funding in this country for higher education to that in most of the rest of the OECD, we find that we do very badly. We fund higher education with a smaller proportion of GDP than the average of OECD countries. We provide less money per student and less total spending. We spend 1.3 per cent of our GDP on higher education, while the United States spends 2.9 per cent. We spend less on services for students, including research activity, than most of our comparators—Australia, the United States, the Nordic countries and Germany. So it is not a very cheerful picture. We can see some of the consequences of that in the report done recently for the Higher Education Funding Council for England—HEFCE—on sustainability. The report by JM Consulting and the Financial Sustainability Strategy Group suggested that our universities are increasingly finding it difficult to sustain their activity. It pointed out that there are particular threats in three aspects of the student learning experience—the accessibility of staff to students; the physical infrastructure for teaching and learning; and student support services. It worried that the structure was unsustainable and pointed out how higher education was increasingly trying to find coping strategies to manage its way through. That is the background against which higher education faces the next few years. I do not think that there is really any doubt that, whoever is in government in the next few years, and whatever people say about the relationship between public spending and growth, there will have to be substantial cuts to reduce our historically high fiscal deficit and that that will have an effect on public spending programmes, including higher education. Already the humanities and social sciences are suffering very considerably. I accept that the Lord President has found some more money for so-called STEM—for science, technology, engineering and management—but, increasingly, it looks as though the view of HEFCE and the Government is that we should privatise the humanities and social sciences and regard them as a cost, not an investment. The Lord President and I are both beneficiaries of an education in humanities and social sciences, but the situation at present in those areas is extremely difficult. Looking ahead, the Lord President will know that while the CBI, for example, has argued that there should be quick and substantial reductions in public spending to reduce the deficit, it is also argued that neither the present Government nor a future Government should make heavy cuts in spending on higher education and research because of their importance to the competitiveness of the country. He will also know that President Obama has, as part of his fiscal stimulus package, put an extra $1 billion into higher education. I hope that, whoever wins the next election, we can develop a consensus across the House that higher education as a trigger for future competitiveness should be looked after rather better in the aftermath of this recession than, perhaps, it was looked after in the 1980s and 1990s. I make one other brief point. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge has in the last year made two remarkable speeches on the importance of diversity of provision in higher education. She has argued passionately that perhaps we need to look more fundamentally at higher education to make the best use of the investment that we can afford, to provide the best experience for her students, and to focus spending on research in the most effective ways. She has in particular drawn attention to the sort of lessons that could be learned from the remodelling of the higher education system in California in the 1960s by Clark Kerr. A review of tuition fees has now been parked with a committee—and I think both main political parties and conceivably even the Liberal Democrats are rather grateful for that, although I cannot remember whether they are in favour of tuition fees these days or against them; perhaps we will learn that later in the debate. I hope that as well as considering the income stream from those fees in the future, we can have a more fundamental look at higher education to ensure that we can still, at the end of the next Parliament, say that we have the second-best higher education system in the world.