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Higher Education

Irrespective of whatever I may or may not be contributing myself, I welcome Lord Browne's review of higher education funding and student finance. I particularly welcome its balance and the way in which its terms of reference allow an exploration of the balance of contribution among taxpayers, students, graduates and employers. Some important points of intergenerational fairness are contained in that review, and I wish to discuss that briefly before posing three questions. This generation is the one that will pick up the bill for this Government's debt crisis, the one that will have to work harder to obtain higher qualifications in order to have the privilege of doing so and, sadly, for reasons that are outside the remit of this debate, the one that is, in many cases, leaving school with worse qualifications in the sense of being able to read, write and get out into the workplace. Many students I meet during the course of my constituency duties testify to that, as do many businesses, which are seeking to employ them positively but are looking for the things that will help them to do that. This generation is also the one that will have to work longer and harder to pay off that debt crisis. I understand that we will all now individually be paying £23,500 to get rid of that debt, and that collectively the amount of interest we are paying on our debt is more than the dedicated schools grant. In addition, inequality has widened over the past decade, as I believe the National Equality Panel report confirms. This year's 18-year-olds are the first to have experienced their entire education under only a Labour Government, starting from that point of five years old, to which I have referred. Given all that, perhaps the Ministers would like to join me in an exercise of arithmetic, although they failed to do that earlier. We know what the choice is facing those young people—incidentally, I should mention that they are also first-time voters—as do they. This Government have failed that generation and its parents. I wish to focus on just three ways in which this Government are confused. I shall focus on this year's sharp increase in the number of applications, on the reduction in the number of undergraduate places and on my concerns about a couple of other matters dealt with in the funding letter that went to institutions last December. First, there will be 6,000 fewer university places in September, so why are the Government not considering ways to allow more students to go to university? My second question relates to the teaching allocation. I understand that the letter says that the allocation decreases by 1.6 per cent. in real terms. Why do the Government not agree that teaching quality and the student experience must not suffer in this round? My third question is rather more of a specialist one, and it relates to historic buildings. I would be grateful for some information from the Government Front-Bench team on why the Government are not sticking by a pledge across the Departments to promote access to the built and historic environment. I shall come on to that shortly. Institutions such as Norwich university college of the arts, which despite sitting in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), who is sadly not in his place, serves my constituents and a wider regional and national area too, are suffering a reduction in resources at a time when demand is extremely high. I can quantify that for hon. Members by saying that there has been an increase of 140 per cent. in the number of applications to it this year. However, it has been limited to an intake of 500 first-year students although it has more than 1,000 applications from students of good ability, attainment and ambition seeking to take its courses. I am not talking just about courses that could be said not to matter—although I challenge anybody in the House to define what such courses might be—but about courses that are strongly linked to areas of emerging economic strength, regionally and nationally. As any Member will know, we are talking about not just units of growth but individual people—18-year-olds—whose hopes are being dashed. What is dashing them? It is not the economic situation alone but the lack of freedom given to higher education institutions to innovate and do what they do best in teaching students. There are ways to create extra places, as demonstrated by my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts). I simply do not think the Government have considered the economic and human impact of allowing this reduction to pass. Anyone who has the academic ability and ambition, as I have said, should have the opportunity to go to university, and I cannot think how the Minister can reconcile his agreement with that statement with such a policy this year. The teaching allocation within the higher education settlement decreases by 1.6 per cent. in real terms this year, as per the letter written by the noble Lord Mandelson in December. Teaching quality and the student experience must not suffer. We need more tutor attention for students, not less, so we are able to compete internationally in higher education. I think that the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property agrees with that. He has said:""Teaching is protected because this government recognises that a higher quality student experience with excellent teaching and research is vital"." Will he now explain how the teaching budget cuts of 1.6 per cent. in real terms protect that teaching? If we are to achieve any consensus on the fees review in a way that is progressive, fair, sustainable and supportive of social mobility, the bargain must be that people pay for higher education but only for good quality higher education. The payment should be for teaching by qualified, experienced, researching academics who work together with their undergraduates and their postgraduates to make our higher education institutions internationally proud places to study in. I want to see whether the Minister can continue to assert in his summing up that Government plans will have no impact on those laudable aims. The final, rather more specialist, aspect of my speech relates, as I mentioned before, to historic buildings. My understanding is that some universities and colleges will be experiencing a particular impact from the noble Lord's cuts because of their historical estates. I understand that some higher education institutions will have suffered the withdrawal of the premium for historic buildings because of that letter. Not only will that undermine the ability to provide an environment for learning, but it will damage our national heritage more broadly. We all value the aims and ideals of education, and we can all understand that point, if it is true. I look forward to some clarification, as I can see looks of puzzlement on the Ministers' faces. I want to draw out a point of confusion in the Government. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport's mission statement—mission statements are wonderful things—states:""We work to support and promote the widest access to excellence in culture—in the arts, in museums and galleries, in architecture and in the built and the historic environment, and libraries."" "Access" is a key word there. It runs through the entire debate and through the themes of fairness that we have been speaking about all evening. As today's motion notes, an enormous contribution is made to our economy and to our civic life by universities. We all want the widest range of access to our economic, civic, educational and heritage assets because that is fair and progressive. Having said that, I do not expect the Chancellor to speak to the First Secretary, or for him to speak to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, but if some parts of the Government are interested in cultural and historical sites of importance while another part of the Government is cutting funding to educational institutions on the same grounds, surely we are all in a pickle. I do not know why the Government are not helping us in this matter by acting in a joined-up way. I would like them to answer all three of the questions that I have posed.