Clause 22 - Power of Secretary of State to impose condition as to student fees, etc.
Higher Education Bill
3:15 pm
Mr Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell, Conservative)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr. Hood.
We now come to a key clause, and I trust that we shall discuss some of the principles behind it in the clause stand part debate. Clause 22 provides for the Secretary of State's powers of intervention. For the first time, he will have the power to direct the universities' affairs and to set out rules that will govern how they seek out their future students, and that debate will follow shortly. The amendments, however, are designed to probe the Secretary of State's powers to impose financial penalties on institutions that do not comply with the plans set out in the Bill, as well as the exact nature and scope of those penalties.
The clause refers to the Secretary of State's power
''to impose a condition requiring that body''—
a funding body—
''to impose a condition under section 23 in relation to any grants, loans or other payments made by that body under section 65 of the 1992 Act''.
The amendment is intended to establish what the Government mean by
''grants, loans or other payments''.
That might sound like a superficial issue, but it relates to an important part of the higher education system. It also raises concerns about many of the things that the Government have done in recent years and about the way in which they have channelled funding to higher education institutions.
I hope that we can probe the scope of the Secretary of State's powers to make financial interventions and the principle behind his power to penalise—using teaching grants and other means—institutions that do not comply with his requirements, with all the implications that that has for universities.
The Government may tell me that I am wrong, but I am working on the assumption that the Bill is about teaching grants, university teaching, undergraduates fees for teaching and all the regulatory paraphernalia that goes with that. When the clause mentions grants, therefore, my assumption is that we are talking about teaching grants.
That raises a variety of other issues in respect of the words ''loans or other payments'', and we must address those issues. We must understand the scope of the power that the Secretary of State is taking on his shoulders and the impact that he may have on individual institutions, should the measures be used in the most draconian way.