Clause 32 - Approval of plans
Higher Education Bill
9:10 am
Mr Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Conservative)
It is a pleasure to serve under your esteemed yet unscheduled and unexpected chairmanship, Mr. Gale. We look forward to seeing whether you transmogrify into your co-Chairman, Mr. Hood, with a whirr of BBC special effects worthy of the regeneration of Dr. Who.
We come to the final day of our deliberations. It is unlikely that the Government will grant us even more time, so we are grateful for the little that we have had and look forward to getting through the immense amount of material that remains. There are some 18 clauses, schedules and new clauses. The Minister will be relieved to hear that given that there is so much material for us to get through, we hope to make progress and do not intend to prolong matters unduly.
The clause is important. It is at the heart of the process by which the director of the office for fair access will impose his or her will on higher education institutions. It also introduces an important mechanism for establishing the extent to which OFFA will be answerable to the Secretary of State for the way in which the powers that the Bill allocates are exercised. Some of the amendments explore how
OFFA will use the powers that are granted to it and how sensible it is for the Secretary of State to have as much power to direct and instruct OFFA on how it should do its job as the clause provides.
The amendment is a clarifying amendment. We are uncertain why ''if it thinks fit'' is necessary in subsection (2), which states:
''The relevant authority may, if it thinks fit, approve the plan.''
As the word ''may'' implies that approval of the plan is not automatic, and as clause 32 and other clauses in part 3 give OFFA some discretion, we are uncertain why it is necessary to specify ''if it thinks fit''. Those words are redundant and we are interested to hear the Minister's technical explanation of them.