Higher Education: Affordability and Quality
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 2 Jul 2026 · 29 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
That this House takes note of the future affordability and quality of higher education.
My Lords, I declare an interest as a former Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education and principal of St Anne’s. Let me say at the outset that our universities are a brilliant global asset and, in order to carry out the innovation and research that they do, they must be free to be elite and not be held back by manipulative regulation or excessive preferential diversity targets. In my maiden speech 20 years ago, I pointed out that it was taken as axiomatic that students see themselves as consumers, with rights and outcomes, mainly that higher education is mostly about higher earning power over a lifetime. I begged to differ. I understand this quantifier now, because the burden of loan repayments is so heavy, but it remains true that HE is not simply about equipping students with skills for employment. It involves unmeasurable assets which add up to a public benefit: induction into citizenship, leadership and employment, instilling ambition and motivation, the ability to savour work and leisure, independence of thought, intelligence and intelligibility, having a stake in the future and control over one’s destiny, and an informed interest in politics. The difficulty in gaining employment is not a weakness of HE; it is the result of this Government’s own policies and the expectations of arguably too many graduates. Studies show, none the less, that only 8% of graduates regret going to university, and far fewer of them are out of work than in the non-university population....
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving us the opportunity to reflect on the future affordability and quality of higher education in this country. Her interest in HE is of long standing, and I recall her very effective role as inaugural chair of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. I will not attempt to address some of the issues that the noble Baroness has raised, but I will address others. This House is well aware that there are real pressures on students, graduates and our universities. Funding has been eroded in real terms, costs have risen, and institutions are being asked to do more for more students with fewer resources. However, let us be equally clear: this is not a system in decline; it is a system under strain, but one that remains one of the country’s greatest national assets. Our universities are engines of growth. They sit at the heart of the Government’s ambitions for productivity, innovation and regional development. From digital arts in Dundee to naval defence in Plymouth, from graphene in Manchester to advanced manufacturing in Sheffield, and from compound semiconductors in south Wales and the extraordinary film and television industry in Belfast, our universities create opportunity. In all parts of the UK, universities are doing much more than educating the next generation workforce. They are at the heart of industry clusters; they drive inward investment in towns and cities all over the country; they generate...
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on calling the debate. I declare my interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London and as a director of Thames Holdings. It would be in the spirit of an education debate to have some set texts. I have two set texts, although I am afraid that they are rather heavily oriented to economics. I should therefore apologise straightaway to the noble Baroness, because she made some very important points. I am thinking of the Policy Exchange paper for which the noble Baroness wrote the foreword, as well as the very recent report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies on graduate earnings. It is worth focusing on these two documents, because they have very different accounts of what is going on. In the words of the Policy Exchange paper, “the graduate … premium has plummeted”. Those are its words and that is a widespread narrative in the media. The IFS finds no such effect. In its words, “average net returns … are large”- and by “large” it means really large. After discounting lifetime earnings at a rate of inflation plus 3%--which is a very high rate that people object to when it is applied to student loans, but the IFS applies it to earnings-you find it is £290,000 extra earnings for a woman and £370,000 of extra earnings for a man over their lives. After you then allow for tax and loan repayments and make some rather heroic calculations about the counterfactual-what someone like that would have achieved by earnings...
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for initiating this debate. It is good to have the opportunity to contribute to thinking about the future affordability and quality of higher education. I do so as the Bishop of Leicester, but also with a close interest in the Cathedrals Group of Universities-14 universities whose distinctive history and mission speak directly to the themes before us: public service, social inclusion and the flourishing of local communities. At its best, higher education is not simply an individual good but a common good. It forms professionals, nurtures civic responsibility and strengthens the social fabric of our nation. Many institutions across our system, including those in the cathedrals group, exemplify this tradition, with roots in civic purpose and long-standing commitment to education as a vehicle for service inclusion and human flourishing. Historically, a number of these institutions were founded to train teachers for communities experiencing deprivation. That purpose continues to shape their work today: they now educate not only teachers but nurses, social workers, physiotherapists and paramedics-often in close partnership with schools, multi-academy trusts and health bodies. In my own diocese of Leicester, we see clearly how vital this local and regional role is. Our universities-that of Leicester, De Montford and Loughborough-are deeply embedded in place. They help to sustain public services, provide pathways for...
Sitting suspended.
My Lords, we are resuming at 3.35 pm. That means that the debate was adjourned for 34 minutes. We will add injury time to the end time, so the new end time is 6.01 pm. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has some time left. We will resume with his speech and then proceed with the speeches in order.
I thank the noble Baroness very much. I am not used to having quite such a dramatic effect when I speak-I did not realise that what I was saying was quite so inflammatory. I will be brief. The universities of the Cathedrals Group remind us that higher education is not only an economic endeavour but a moral and social one. It is about the formation of people, the strengthening of communities and the pursuit of the common good. If we are serious about that vision then we must ensure that the structures surrounding our institutions-financial, organisational and relational-enable them to fulfil that purpose.
My Lords, if the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester’s speech was inflammatory, mine is burned-so I am starting afresh, ad-libbing. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on securing this debate. It is not an easy task to win a ballot for debates among the Cross-Benchers, as the competition is usually pretty fierce, particularly as one of the competitors was the convenor-but she won it and I thank her. I will briefly speak about the challenges that universities face around research. We know that our leading universities are world leaders in research. We contribute more publications than any other country in the world. Our citation index for universities is 1.54, which is extremely high, and 16% of publications are rated at more than 10% in citations. The value of universities is enormous. We do blue-sky research, and universities contribute to early innovations and help build billion-pound industries. For the population of 0.8%, we have a publication record of about 6%. Some 60% of the publications are international collaborations. Of the £72 billion that the United Kingdom spends on R&D-which is 2.64% of GDP-higher education is responsible for 24% of all of it, which is £17.1 billion a year. What is amazing is that that is the highest of the OECD countries. Japan, for instance, is the next highest, but it is at 11%, compared with 24% for higher institutions in the United Kingdom. Where do universities get their funding from? They get it mainly from UKRI,...
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Deech for initiating the debate. I declare my interest as principal of Hertford College, Oxford. I was incredibly lucky to have one-to-one and one-to-two tuition at university. My tutor said, “I have you for three years. I’m going to spend two of them teaching you how to think and then, at the end, I’m going to teach you how to pass the exams”. Over two years, I learned how to learn by myself, how to think critically and how to interrogate evidence and ideas-I was perhaps less good at learning how to pass the exams, which was not my tutor’s fault. I then went on to do a doctorate; like all doctorates, it was on a weirdly specialised topic that few outside the field would think important-perhaps even few inside the field. Again, I was lucky in my supervisor. He reminded me that a doctoral degree is education. It is about learning skills, not about making advances in the field. Every chapter was training me in a different skill. As a doctoral student, you have to become even more independent as a learner and a thinker, and do more creative thinking within the bounds of your topic. As an individual student, the skills gained from this kind of education are very flexible. The specific facts and knowledge are not the point. I suspect that noble Lords who have done a degree, even one that is related to their professional career, rarely use much, if any, of the knowledge from the course. Instead, subjects are more a way of embedding the...
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Deech on securing today’s debate. Her commitment to the issues of quality and affordability in higher education is second to none. I declare an interest as the founding president of Reuben College, Oxford’s newest college: a 21st century college in a 900 year-old university. In early 2025, just over two years after the launch of ChatGPT, a survey carried out by the Higher Education Policy Institute revealed that 90% of UK undergraduates were using AI in their assessments. As a professor from the University of Warwick recently put it, “all typed work by students is now worthless as a means of assessing them and their knowledge”. Many departments are going back to hand-written assessments for all tests that matter, and I believe that we should contemplate reintroducing all exams as part of summative assessments, such as finals. Right now, conversations about AI in the higher education sector are mostly defensive, and this needs to change. The question should not be “How do we catch students cheating with AI?” but “How can we reimagine the delivery of education in the age of AI?” As with the social media ban, it appears that Australia is ahead of the UK in this domain. In a recent paper, two Australian academics argued that, as AI automates analytical tasks, the true purpose of a university must shift from teaching students how to generate answers to developing capabilities in reasoning, critical judgment and acting under...
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, and to see Oxford so well represented in this afternoon’s debate. With that in mind, I declare interests as provost of Worcester College in Oxford, but also as the chair of governors of the University of the Arts in London. As has been widely acknowledged in the debate this afternoon, our universities are among the finest in the world. They generate world-leading research, attract international talent and contribute billions of pounds each year to our economy. Yet I think it is no understatement to say that the higher education sector is in crisis. Higher education should be an opportunity for all, not a financial burden that deters talented students from fulfilling their potential. I was fortunate to be the first in my family to go to university. I was supported by a student grant and I was able to graduate, believe it or not, without any debt. Times have changed, but I would like as many young people from similar backgrounds to enjoy the same good fortune. Tuition fees have undoubtedly provided universities with a stable income, but rising living costs and concerns about debt are discouraging many able students from applying. It is therefore welcome that the Government have announced the return of maintenance grants for lower-income students. However, these are currently linked only to priority courses. My preference would be that such courses were defined more broadly, so that students from lower-income...
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Deech for securing this debate and express my agreement with many of the themes in her speech. I declare my interest as a jobbing academic and, having listened to what has already been said this afternoon, I speak with great relief that I did not have to compete with AI, although I think some very important things have been said on that subject this afternoon. Because of the exigencies of my life, being married to an academic whose books were occasionally more fashionable than mine, I have travelled around a lot. I have taught in one of the old polytechnics, been a fellow of a Cambridge college, taught at a fairly basic, if I can say that, American state university and at an American Ivy League school, so I have seen educational systems in this country and abroad. I have been an external examiner in Galway and in the European university in Florence. I have been around a bit-it is multicoloured-and what I am going to say is based on that experience. The first thing I want to say is that I agree with all those who have spoken this afternoon and said we talk so often in this country about our world-leading this and that, but the one thing that really is world-leading is our higher education. The figures are indisputable. If you look at the top 10 universities or the number of universities-it is 26-we have in the top 200 in the THE list, or look at the QS list and so on, the figures are indisputable. Holland is perhaps one country that...
My Lords, I speak as a former professor of Christian ethics at the University of Leeds, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford. I declare an interest as the chairman of the Free Speech Union. I simply want to underscore the plea from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for our universities to become more muscular in the defence and promotion of liberal culture. Britain’s universities are culturally strategic because they educate the elites who run our institutions, be they economic, social or political. Let us be clear: elites are a social necessity, even if elitism is something we should avoid. Because they educate our elites, universities are important not just for economic success, as they are, but for the kind of society we want to be. Do we want to be a society whose leaders have been educated to reason, to proportion claims to evidence and to yield to justified criticism? Do we want our leaders to be the kind of people who are capable of honest reasoning because they have been formed in the virtues of self-restraint, humility and courage, which are necessary for it, or do we want to be led by graduates indoctrinated by dogmatic, ideological professors who penalise dissidents? Do we want to be led by graduates who have witnessed university authorities let aggressively ideological students abuse and intimidate them? Do we want graduate leaders who have learned that the only way to advance in the world is to keep their thoughts to themselves and their mouths...
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Deech for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I wish to make one single point, which is to draw attention to the threat to arts and humanities courses at universities, which is a long-term concern but one that appears to be getting worse. As the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, said, the latest victim of this is the faculty of humanities, arts and social sciences at the University of Exeter, a Russell group university, with over 110 academic roles proposed to be cut, affecting subjects including the visual arts, history, English and languages. But Exeter is not alone. The universities of Hertfordshire, Leicester, Nottingham, Cardiff, and Bristol, Goldsmiths, University of London, and others have all recently either closed courses or threatened closures in music, creative writing, film studies, theatre, English, theology and modern languages. My worry is not just this trend, which has deep-seated roots-I will come back to that-but the Government’s attitude towards this trend, which is more than worrying. The DfE’s announcement in the press release last week of a new deal for young people says: “Ministers will unveil plans to crack down on poor-quality university courses”. On Tuesday, in an Oral Question, I asked the Minister for the criteria that would be used to define “poor-quality courses”. In reply she said that it is, in part, “the ability to determine what the returns are from individual courses. It is for that reason that we...
My Lords, I too express my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for securing this debate. I declare my interest as a professor at King’s College London. I am one of the many Europeans who came to this country to pursue an academic career. I arrived at the age of 22 with a first degree from an Italian university, with respectable-but certainly not native-English, and with a social network that consisted of only two people, both Italian students. After my master’s degree, however, I obtained funding to do a PhD at the LSE, and I got my first academic job at Oxford. What academic immigrants like me found was that British universities, unlike universities in our countries of origin, were liberal and based on merit. They did not demand conformity. They were institutions where young academics especially could flourish. This was in part because, as a young researcher, one did not feel stifled by overbearing professorial egos, as was unfortunately the norm in Italian, German or French universities. In my 32 years in this country, things have changed. These changes have been examined in the report by Policy Exchange that has been mentioned. It has a powerful foreword by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I associate myself with what she wrote in that report, and with the excellent introductory speech that she gave. The Policy Exchange report identifies several trends that many of us who work in universities recognise well. First, there is the growth in managerialism and...
My Lords, there can surely be no doubt about the timeliness-indeed, the urgency-of a debate on higher education, as the facts flow in of universities in financial trouble, of the lack of value of a university education, of universities being pushed towards unwanted mergers, and of the impact of the Government’s immigration policies on universities. There can be no better person to lead this debate than my noble friend Lady Deech, whose career in higher education has been so outstanding-although I warn the House that the line I will take on international students is a bit different from hers. Let us hope, therefore, that those with responsibility for universities in the new Government will read this debate and give it due weight, as they move towards decisions that cannot be made without damage being done to a sector of our economy that really matters to its future health and growth. Any analysis of the higher education sector in this country could surely not escape the conclusion that it is potentially highly positive to our economy. After all, we do not have that many sectors of our economy where we stand second in the global rankings, behind only the United States, nor many where the benefits to such a wide spread of our economy, including often being the principal employer in relatively small towns and cities, are so marked. You might expect such an economic treasure to be nurtured and promoted by the Governments of whichever party. If we had an industrial sector that had...
My Lords, I must thank my noble friend Lady Deech for securing this debate, which has been appositely framed with the words “affordability and quality”. I will tackle these words from an economic angle and from an employer’s perspective, reflecting, in part, on my own experience. Before I go down that path, I readily accept, like many others, that higher education should not be measured purely through the lens of economic impact, jobs, salaries and the ability to pay back student loans. Universities should be character-building through those vital formative years. It is where you develop life, social and communication skills and, indeed, have your beliefs questioned and challenged. You should graduate with much more than a degree, and many students develop friendships or partnerships that last for a lifetime. It would be remiss of me not to mention that I met both my wife and my business partner at university, and both would claim, quite rightly, to be of greater importance to me than my rather modest second-class degree in economics. That said, it is difficult to avoid the economic and financial consequences, and whether you look at this from the Government’s, employers’ or students’ perspective, the data is deeply concerning. Put bluntly, higher education is not working. Let me start with our public finances. Sitting on the Treasury’s balance sheet is a current liability of £295 billion of unpaid student debt. That figure will reach £500 billion in the next decade, and...
My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of King’s College London and as an honorary fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. At this stage of the debate, I will just draw out a few of the salient points that we have heard so far and pose one or two related questions. The first is that I particularly commend the excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, which drew attention to the latest data published by the IFS. Indeed, although he did not mention it, we have seen new data from the Department for Education this month which demonstrates that graduates go on to earn higher average salaries even when compared with those who have similar GCSEs but did not go to university. That is clearly encouraging. It is also encouraging that on 11 June we saw revealed that the number of students who view their university course as “good value for money” has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, and in fact, only 7% of students now say that, with hindsight, they would have preferred not to go into higher education. Interestingly, in contrast with that, when you ask the general public what they think the student response would be, they say that about 40% of students probably have regret, although it is only 7%. That is the good news. However, as we have heard extensively, there is absolutely no grounds for complacency. For students, living costs are an increasing burden, such that more than two-thirds of full-time undergraduates now have paid jobs in term time. Teaching is...
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is to be congratulated on stimulating a very good debate. I agree with her fundamentally about freedom of speech and the shocking rise in antisemitism and intolerance in our universities, but I do not agree with the central thrust of her argument: that we should revert to having a more elitist higher education system. I was a product of the elitist system when, in 1964, I got a telegram telling me I had won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, as only 6% of my age group went to university. I had a great time. My dad was a railway clerk, and I had a full grant with all my fees paid. I went on to do a master’s for another two years-all at the public’s expense. It was great. However, I think we were right to make higher education a mass model; that degree of generosity to an elite could not be sustained. It was obviously unfair that people who did not go to university paid high taxes for the people who did, and therefore the fee system had a great logic to it. I had the privilege of being chair of council at Lancaster University for seven years, and there I saw how wonderful this mass expansion of higher education had been. That institution had one of the best equity records among academic, research-intensive universities in recruiting state school students, and it also came out very well in the research assessment exercise. So, in principle, that can be done and we should resist the temptation to go back to a narrowly based elite...
My Lords, I join fellow noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lady Deech for securing this important debate. As we have heard several times this evening, two major problems are converging in the higher education field. The first is the underfunding of universities: the Office for Students has warned that 45% of higher education providers are likely to run a deficit in 2025 and 2026. The second problem, of course, is the colossal accumulation of student debt: in England alone, it has reached the figure of £295 billion and is continuing to increase, and much of it will remain unpaid. There is no doubt, as we have heard from many noble Lords, that our best universities are world class and a jewel in our crown, and our objective should be to ensure their financial sustainability. But I question whether we need all the universities that currently exist. That may be a heresy from someone who has worked in higher education for 30 years, but we have to be honest about the problems we face and the possible solutions. The seeds of this problem lie in the policy of then Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1999, who set a goal to have 50% of 18 to 30 year-olds attending university. Following this, the number of UK higher education institutions rose by 45% up to 2021, but the attendant fall in further education colleges was 40% over the same period. What was the evidence for that goal of 50%? It sounds to me more like a political slogan than an evidence-based objective. It created an image...
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Deech is to be congratulated on securing this crucial debate. As a current pro-chancellor at Cardiff University and a previous chair of council at Cardiff Metropolitan, I suggest that this debate should not be framed as a choice between affordability for students and sustainability for universities. Why? Because a system unaffordable for students damages participation, and a system financially unsustainable for universities damages quality, choice, research capacity and economic growth overall. In Wales, enrolments at Welsh higher education providers fell by 5% in 2024-25, compared with a 1% fall across the UK as a whole. Wales already faces participation challenges, particularly among learners from deprived communities and those needing more flexible routes into higher education. Wales has a more integrated tertiary education system, which creates an opportunity to plan across schools, colleges, universities, apprenticeships and lifelong learning, but high-quality provision is not cheap. Cardiff University has not been alone in recording a recent underlying operating deficit. Almost one-third of the £33.4 million deficit in 2024-25 was through the loss of international student tuition fee income. To address this, we developed our academic futures strategy, which has embraced change across the whole university. As with other research-intensive universities, research has been cross-subsidised from other income streams, but, as my noble friend...
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for securing this important debate. I thank all noble Lords who have taken part for the points they have raised, which are clearly important to many of us who are interested in the higher education sector. It comes at a crucial moment for higher education in England. I declare an interest, in that my daughter has just finished her first year at Sheffield Hallam University. I note that a number of challenges are facing the university sector: mounting financial pressures, as we heard from many noble Lords; declining affordability for students, particularly given the cost of living crisis; a growing concern about quality and value for money; and the need to ensure that world-class universities remain engines of opportunity, innovation and economic growth. This debate comes at a pivotal moment, as I said, because only this week, during Oral Questions, I asked the Government what long-term strategy they have to address the growing financial crisis facing our universities. I did so following a meeting that I attended in my home city of Sheffield, where students and staff from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University came together to describe first hand the consequences of years of financial uncertainty, redundancies, course closures and growing anxiety about the future of institutions that are central to our city’s economy and identity. For us, the starting point is straightforward....
My Lords, what a superb debate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has secured. I thank all noble Lords this afternoon for their excellent and informed contributions. I feel the least academically qualified in the House to speak among so many doctorates, master’s and prestigious holders of positions at some of the universities to which we have referred. What I have heard this afternoon is that where our higher education is good, it is really good-world-beating. Where it is not so good, there are so many factors to consider that what we need-as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has said this afternoon-is a lot more data to understand and dig into where it is going wrong. We on these Benches welcome the work the Government are doing on apprenticeships. But we also believe that we need more data on whether those apprenticeships will provide fair outcomes for those who participate, in the same way that the IFS has undertaken an exercise on university degrees. We need to think about the lower-value courses. I take on board the point the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, made about the creative arts. I spoke during a Question on history master’s degrees and made very clear my position: that the humanities are essential to the health of our nation and our future intellectual vigour. But we need to understand which of those creative arts courses are not performing. Again, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that perhaps there is more data to be collated by the Government. I invite the...
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for raising this subject. In my two years in this place and in this job, it has become very obvious to me that there is nothing that the House of Lords likes more than a debate about higher education, perhaps because people are able to bring such expertise and experience, as we have seen today. I begin, as many noble Lords have, with a recognition of the value of higher education, and of our higher education sector. It is, as many have said, world leading. It includes four of the world’s top 10 universities and has educated 59 current or recent world leaders. It generates significant economic value, contributing over £265 billion to the UK economy and supporting around 750,000 jobs. The noble Baroness, Lady Freeman-who I congratulate on her relatively recent appointment as principal of my former college, Hertford-was absolutely right in identifying that the sector enables the development of critical, independent and creative thinking. I recognise the point by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, that this is also something that we need to safeguard within our universities. Beyond its economic impact, higher education is, as others have argued, associated with substantial social benefits, including better health outcomes, longer life expectancy and higher well-being among graduates. Higher education providers also play a vital civic role, strengthening local communities and contributing to public services, place-making and regional...
My Lords, this debate has sounded the alarm to the Minister and the department about what is going on in our universities. In fact, ever since Prime Minister Tony Blair, the attitude of successive Governments has been somewhat “light the blue touchpaper” in relation to numbers and “stand back and see what happens”. There is a real crisis, and the fact that we have gathered this afternoon such a galaxy of leading academics of this country is in itself a tribute to the effect of higher education. In fact, there are dozens of other Members of the House-maybe more than that-who could not be here this afternoon but who are also the most distinguished academics. However, I hazard a guess that many of them, like me, and as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, benefited from free tuition, maintenance grants and a smooth passage through higher education. Not least of our luminaries in this House is the noble Lord, Lord Rees. If ever there was an exemplar of scientific research at the highest level, recognised around the world, it is him, and it is a privilege that he sits here. I think he stands in himself for a more flexible attitude to higher education, less of a division between humanities and science, and the contribution that scientists can make to the general well-being of the country. We should learn from that and adopt a more flexible approach, whether it is allowing students to have more of a mixture of subjects or turning some universities into places that offer a different...
House adjourned at 5.42 pm.