That is a really difficult matter to judge, to be honest, because I think that people will suffer detriment whatever decision is taken. That is the nature of all the decisions that we are taking around Covid right now. Every day, I am conscious that when we take a decision to try to reduce harm in one area, there is the potential for us to create harm in another area. We make the best balanced judgements that we can make.

We have sought to ensure—Governments across the United Kingdom and many other parts of the world have reached the same decisions—that we give as many young people as possible the opportunity to have some normality in their university or college education, while taking important steps to mitigate the risk of transmission of the virus.

People can argue—it is not illegitimate to do so—that we should have just kept everyone at home, but harm would have been done to students by doing that. They would have been denied the opportunity to make the links and connections that come with being in a campus environment, because university is about more than lectures and academic learning.

We put in place substantial guidance to make sure that universities take the right steps, and we continue to work with universities to ensure that that is the case. The welfare of students should, at this point, be universities’ paramount interest, so we continue to liaise with them closely to make sure that that is the case.