Clause 3 - Expenses of Council
Higher Education Bill
10:15 am
Mr Simon Thomas (Chief Whip; Ceredigion, Plaid Cymru)
I am looking forward to working with you on the Committee, Mr. Gale, to see how we can possibly improve this dreadful Bill.
However, I welcome this part of the Bill because I completely agree with the establishment of the arts and humanities research council. The purpose of the amendment is to probe some of the ideas that were mentioned in the debates on the two previous clauses, especially what may happen under the dual support mechanism when the Bill's proposals on variable tuition fees—top-up fees—come into play.
I tabled the amendment because I am worried that a two-tier system of higher education—teaching universities and colleges, and research institutions—will develop in the United Kingdom. The current meld of the two from which we benefit so much in terms of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching will be
undermined and weakened in many parts of the country and, over time, will decline. Instead, there will be a concentration of research money, institutions and expertise in certain areas; for example, the golden triangle around Oxford, Cambridge and the Thames valley. The amendment was tabled to try to ensure that the Government do not achieve what they want in that respect. We will see how far we get.
The amendment would change the funding of the research councils, assuming that the arts and humanities research council is established by royal charter. I remind hon. Members that at present the dual support mechanism means that there is a payment from the funding councils in Wales and England. Two different funding councils make payments to fund the general cost of the basic research infrastructure, including laboratories and equipment. Arts and humanities do not need laboratories and equipment, but they need offices, IT and so on, from the general funding councils. I assume that that will continue.
The other element is provided by the research councils and depends on the research assessment exercise, which is much cursed by academics, certainly those in Aberystwyth and Lampeter. Every department is assessed on the basis of its research capabilities and excellence and those that achieve a five or five-star assessment are eligible to apply for grants from the research councils, although they do not necessarily get them. As the Minister said, the way that the application system works is that proposals are made; I think an awful lot are recycled.
Under the Royal Society exchange scheme between parliamentarians and scientists, I have had the opportunity to spend some interesting times in the last couple of months with a scientist in Aberystwyth called Dr. Gareth Griffith. As an arts and humanities graduate, I found it an eye opener to visit the laboratories and the infrastructure, good and bad, where Dr. Griffith works and to try to appreciate the immense time and effort that he spends in making applications to research councils and for external research. For example, he is applying to carry out research on a type of cocoa fungus, which could be useful for the Department for International Development in overcoming the problem that the fungus causes in developing countries such as Brazil and on the west coast of Africa.
All sorts of interesting work is going on in our universities, as we well know. It is interesting to be directly exposed to that, and to have an idea of the immense amount of administrative time and effort that goes in to so much academic work nowadays. Much work is done on applying for money and trying to get extra bits of resources to patch together a decent research department in order to attract the best students and lecturers and to build success. The problem is that if a department cannot quite get there and is drowning at the shoreline, as we Welsh say, it will never be good enough to make an application to the research councils; it will always be able to get
something from its funding council and to maintain some level of infrastructure, but it will not be able to break through.
The Government have tried to do something with student support and access in the Bill, which we will debate later. It is interesting that they have recognised that some institutions cream off the best students, and that some students may be prevented from attending some institutions by barriers other than academic ability. Through the Office for Fair Access, the Government seek a different way to ensure that there is a spread of ability throughout the higher education institutions of England and Wales, without artificial barriers.
With these amendments, we are trying to do much the same for the research councils, at least in principle. We recognise that there are good departments that undertake interesting lines of research that could benefit the economic development and cultural welfare of this country. They are not quite able to access the research council funding because they are caught in the double bind of not being able to get the good research in order to get funding and a five-star grading and, therefore, never quite break through.
For example—I can only give examples from Wales, the area I know best—I contacted the research councils and asked, ''What sort of allocation is there between England and Wales, because Wales has about 5 per cent. of the population, but about 6 per cent. of the students?'' We have always educated a lot of students in Wales. I wanted to know what proportion of research council money was generally being spent in Wales and in England.
About ten years ago, an eminent politician and physicist who will be known to the Welsh members of the Committee, Dr. Phil Williams—sadly, he died last year—found that Wales was being short-changed by the research councils. He found that about 2 or 3 per cent. of funding was coming to Wales, even though it had 5 per cent. of the population and 6 per cent. of students. I understand that the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs is looking into that and that the research councils are gathering information for that Committee, but they do not have that information yet. I am concerned that we may be creating systems when we should be collecting relevant information about where the money will be allocated in order to ensure that it will not feed those institutions that other parts of the Bill, and OFFA, are trying to change.