Clause 30 - General duties of relevant authority
Higher Education Bill
9:10 am
Mr Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell, Conservative)
Absolutely, Mr. Gale. It is important, however, that we give proper and full consideration to the establishment of the access
regulator, and it is regrettable that we are being forced to start with amendment No. 24, which relates to issues beyond the principle of establishing the regulator. However, we must move on and discuss the details of the regulator's remit rather than whether the regulator should exist in the first place.
The principle behind amendment No. 24 is a fundamental one that Conservative Members feel passionate about. We do not want the access regulator at all. We believe that the provision is a mistaken attempt by the Government to interfere in the independence of universities. With the amendment, we are trying to redress the balance, and to do so in a way that, as I will come to shortly, has many supporters, not least among those in senior positions on the Government benches.
The access regulator is being established by the Government to give them the power—for the first time—to wield a direct influence over how universities select their students. The Minister and the Secretary of State have been at pains to say that it is not about the application process, but purely about the admissions strategies of universities. The two are umbilically linked. The concept of a strategy to secure applicants cannot be separated from how those applicants are admitted. They are, inevitably, two sides of the same coin. The Government's approach is designed to give the Secretary of State, the Minister and the Government the ability to tell universities what they must do when admitting students.
Conservative Members have profound misgivings about the measure, as do many vice-chancellors. I think that if it were brought forward in isolation and if it were purely a social engineering measure and not attached to a carrot—if it were just a stick—there would be a widespread rebellion by vice-chancellors. Many vice-chancellors already do excellent work in trying to encourage applications from non-traditional backgrounds. Good work takes place in the higher education sector, trying to create opportunities for people who would not traditionally have gone to university or would have found it difficult, in the past, to achieve the level of success in their school environment that would have given them the opportunity to be credible applicants for university. That work is already happening. The Government are seeking to interfere and dictate where, in our view, they should not be doing so.