Clause 22 - Power of Secretary of State to impose condition as to student fees, etc.
Higher Education Bill
9:10 am
Mr Alan Johnson (Minister of State (Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education), Department for Education and Skills; Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, Labour)
That simply goes back to the point that I made during the previous sitting. If the funding provided through regional development agencies is HEFCE funding—quality related money for research—it is subject to the conditions under the clause. If the funding comes from the research councils, it is not. There is a clear division. In fact, if we follow the proposals in the Lambert report, funding from RDAs is more likely to come from QR money than research council money.
The second pair of amendments relates to the phrase
''an institution of a class''
and would exclude further education colleges from the definition of a ''relevant institution''. The reason for including the phrase ''institution of a class'' is so that the Secretary of State, in the grant letter to HEFCE, does not have to list every individual university. We have published the proposed grant letter to be used in three years' time, which contains an example of an institution of a class because paragraph 3 refers to ''every relevant institution''. A relevant institution is a class. For example, Birkbeck would not be in that class because it is not a relevant institution—all of its courses are part-time. The Open university might be in the same position, but there may be complexities in that case. That is what we mean by a class of institution. An institution may belong to one class or another according to whether it has an access plan, because a different set of conditions will apply. It is simply a measure to avoid the Secretary of State having to list onerously every individual institution, and I hope that hon. Members will accept that there is nothing more to that. Every class would have to be defined by objective criteria so the phrasing is not as open-ended as hon. Members might have initially thought.
I counsel the Committee to reject the amendment on further education colleges, because it would completely deregulate fees. We are dealing with the power of the Secretary of State to apply conditions. If the Secretary of State cannot apply conditions in FE colleges, those undertaking higher education courses could charge whatever they like. The amendment would have that unintended consequence. However, I believe that it is a probing amendment, which allows me to clarify the situation in FE colleges. For those that have higher education courses franchised to them from a university, the onus for access plans and so on falls on the university not the FE college. For those FE college courses funded directly from HEFCE, which is a minority, the onus is on the FE college to ensure that their access plans are in place.