Higher Education

Part of Rating (Property in Common Occupation) and Council Tax (Empty Dwellings) Bill (Ways and Means) – in the House of Commons at 8:16 pm on 23 April 2018.

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Photo of Angela Rayner Angela Rayner Shadow Secretary of State for Education 8:16, 23 April 2018

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I pay tribute to the Education Committee for its work in holding the Government to account, but I will believe what she has said when I see action. The Government have taken no action whatsoever against vice-chancellors’ pay. It is all warm words and no action. Will the Office for Students be concerned with the real issues, or simply with scoring cheap political points? [Interruption.]

The simple fact is that the Government have created a regulator in which it is hard for the sector, let alone the rest of us, to have any confidence, and the regulations simply entrench the problem. Today, we cannot turn the clock back and unpick the entire regulatory framework that the Office for Students establishes. That is not what will happen if the motion is passed. Instead, the Government will be forced to think again about the problems that we have raised, and come up with genuine solutions that will create a regulator that has the confidence of those whom it regulates. That is all that I am asking them to do.