Clause 34 - Variation of plans
Higher Education Bill
10:15 am
Mr Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Conservative)
This is a genuinely important amendment and I commend the hon. Gentleman for tabling it. I was disappointed that he said it was largely a probing amendment, because although it is not perfect, if he were to press it to a Division we would support it.
If there is to be a vestige of academic freedom and institutional autonomy after the Bill is enacted, it is crucial that once a plan has been perhaps laboriously negotiated between the director and the university, and during the time frame of the plan which, as the Minister said, may be as long as five years, the university should know exactly where it stands. It should know that once agreements have been reached it will be left to get on with implementing them.
The difficulty with clause 34 is that it puts in place a procedure whereby a negotiated and agreed access plan can be overturned or varied. There is no limitation on the extent of variation, so conceivably it could be changed almost in its entirety at any point in its lifetime. That does not give higher education institutions the certainties that they require.
The amendment goes only some way towards ameliorating the position, as it would retain the phrase
''with the approval of the relevant authority'',
which we object to. An access plan that is negotiated ought to be a contract: it should be reached by mutual consent, having been negotiated equally, implemented properly and subsequently respected by both parties. The clause clearly implies that this is not a contract within that term's widely understood interpretation: if one party to a contract can unilaterally, at any time, vary any part of the terms of that contract, it is not a contract of the sort with which people will be familiar within other contexts. That is the problem.
The amendment at least requires that the act of variation be made by the university or higher education institution. However, by retaining the need for that variation to have the approval of the relevant authority, we believe that it would give far too much discretion to the director of fair access to rip up freely negotiated agreements and to go down pathways that would be deeply injurious to the principles of university independence. Our view is that the Bill would be better without the clause. We think that there should be enforced access plans, and that there should not be a director at all. However, if we are to have such plans and a director, it must surely be a matter of common sense that everyone can see, that if the negotiations are to have value once a plan has been agreed, that there should not be the constant prospect of its being reorganised.