Clause 23 - Condition that may be requried to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
10:00 am
Mr Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Conservative)
We now come to the heart of the Bill. I suspect, as the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell) has said, that this will be the part of our proceedings on which we have the fullest debate. These are the issues in which hon. Members and those following our proceedings have the greatest interest.
I salute the hon. Lady for her independence of thinking. She has clearly brought a great deal of personal experience and commitment to the issue. I put that on the record, because I am not able to agree with all her points, but I applaud her courage in addressing these issues from her own point of view and that of her constituents, rather than because of party political pressure.
Several of the points that the hon. Lady made are difficult to answer. She mentioned the potential incentive effect—which is frequently quoted by the Secretary of State and others—of a zero rate of variable fee in certain cases such as physics and mathematics. Opposition Members would make the case that if it were an incentive to people to set fees at zero, it follows that it would be a disincentive to set fees at above zero. That is one reason why Opposition Members are against having top-up fees at all. She is right to say that she has identified an issue that must be addressed by the Government Front Bench team: I hope that it will be.
The aspect of the hon. Lady's argument that I did not fully share, and which the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) set out clearly, was why variability should be deeply sinful in higher education but—it is implied—is somehow acceptable in further education, part-time courses and other areas where it is already a well understood part of the system. A number of Labour Members asked her about that, and I was more convinced by them than by what she said in response. We cannot please all the people all the time.
The hon. Lady and other members of the Committee have used language that suggests that the Government are moving towards a market in higher education. That prompts the question: what do we think we have now? Is there already a market? One could argue that the Government's measures make it more of a market, but the current system could hardly be described as having no market-like properties.
I was a little worried when the hon. Lady said that she felt that it was wrong to give students an extra element of choice, because it is desirable for students to have choice. The point that she was making was that students should focus on choices that have to do with the courses that they can pursue and in which they are interested, as opposed to choices based on price mechanisms.
The hon. Lady is likely to be one of those who would welcome the idea of treating 18-year-olds as independent adults—I shall stand corrected if I am wrong, but I see that she nods. There is an emerging cross-party consensus that it would be desirable, if the practicalities could be overcome, to treat 18-year-olds as adults who are capable of making decisions about such matters. That would be an argument for maximising the number of choices that they are
entitled to make at the age of 18, rather than minimising them. I do not therefore agree with her on her central argument—the case against variability.