Clause 23 - Condition that may be required to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
That is a perfectly fair comment, coming from a real lawyer intervening on a barrack-room lawyer. I respect my hon. Friend for the spirit in which he raised that matter.
Before we go through the specifics of the amendment, I want to stress that we need to avoid unintended consequences. We need to avoid a theoretical situation in which a higher education institution might exploit an individual student and impose unnecessary burdens that would excite concerns on the Government Benches. Equally, we need to ensure that a clever, well-advised higher education institution could not creep out from under the net of the Minister's intentions and cock a snook at them, thus devaluing and discrediting the whole process. Without prejudice as to whether the process should go ahead, it is important that it should go right.
The first point is a simple one. I noticed in the, as ever, helpful briefing on this—Universities UK drew my attention to it—the need to have a debate on the transposition of the provisions of the 1998 Act into this part, and indeed subsequent parts of the Bill, including the definitions clause, clause 38. Although I did not participate in that earlier legislation, I understand that it was spotted then that a fee was not the only thing that could be charged between a student and their institution, and Ministers realised that there could also be other kinds of fees in different institutions, and in particular additional or supplementary fees. The general list was set out in the 1998 Act, which has itself been updated—perhaps the Minister might want to say something about that—and is in effect being transposed into this legislation, although the provisions particular to the 1998 Act are being removed.
There was then a rule that fees controlled by the basic and higher limits—of course we did not have variable fees then—included admission, registration, tuition and graduation fees, but excluded those for board and lodging, field trips, the graduation ceremony itself and a number of other items that might be prescribed. It would genuinely be a service to the Committee if the Minister could say a little about how that has worked since 1998 and how it will work under the new regime. These additional fees should either be included in the list—which, if there is a principle, is academically related—or separated from the main academic processes.