Examination of Witnesses (Questions 516-519)
WEDNESDAY 5 MARCH 2003
PROFESSOR DAVID
EASTWOOD AND
DR PETER
KNIGHT
Chairman
516. Can I welcome, Dr Peter Knight and Professor
David Eastwood, Vice-Chancellors of the Universities of Central
England and East Anglia. It is very good of you to come before
the Committee at reasonably short notice and I hope you got a
flavour of the Committee's present inquiry from the session with
HEFCE which has just finished. Some of the questions will go over
that sort of ground but some are newly minted just for you. Is
there anything you would like to say which would inform the Committee's
investigation into assessing the White Paper before we start or
do you want to go straight into questions. Peter Knight?
(Dr Knight) I welcome the introduction
of the £3,000 fee. I enthusiastically welcome the fact it
is not to be paid up front. I think the rest of the White Paper
is highly prescriptive of the nature of higher education, often
on the basis of almost no evidence to support the opinions expressed
and occasionally forgets that I do not think the Government owns
the universities.
517. David Eastwood?
(Professor Eastwood) I did, and do, welcome the White
Paper. It is not wholly comfortable for universities to have moved
higher up the political agenda but it is welcome. I suppose in
broadly welcoming the White Paper I would like to make two general
comments. Firstly in order to drive forward the agenda of the
White Paper we will need a period of stability in the sector,
and some of the recent turbulence following the White Paper has
been unhelpful in deflecting the sector's response to the White
Paper. The second point would be to say that in the White Paper
and some of the commentary surrounding it, it seems to me the
success of UK universities over the last 10 to 15 years has been
under-estimated, not least in our maintaining and I would argue
enhancing the quality of what we do in a period where the unity
of resource of funding more generally has been squeezed.
518. What view do you take of the increased
resource that the Government is very proud of announcing? It is
said this is the best deal higher education has ever had. Is that
how it feels at the front end?
(Dr Knight) You appreciate Howard has just gone off
to announce our grant letters so we do not know the detail, indeed
we feel slightly nervous as a result. There is no doubt there
is extra money for research, particularly science and that end
of research. Once you disaggregate the additional inescapable
costs that universities are going to incur of teaching like the
national insurance increase, for the new universities 4.5/5.1%
increase in pension costs and you disaggregate the special initiatives
that are advocated in the White Paper, my best assessment is that
in real terms there is no increased funding for teaching, it is
zero over the three years.
519. It is more or less in line with Universities
UK's evaluation, is it not?
(Dr Knight) I try not necessarily to agree with Universities
UK but the figures speak for themselves. There is effectively
no real term increase in funding for teaching.
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