Examination of Witness (Questions 347-359)
8 NOVEMBER 2004
DR KIM
HOWELLS MP
Q347 Chairman: Good afternoon, Dr Howells.
It is very nice to have you here for your first appearance before
the Committee, since I have chaired it anyway. There was some
speculation that this is in fact a cruel irony in that normally
we are asking questions of ministers and they say, "It happened
before my time, Chairman", but we have a case here where
you were in the department previously. So, perhaps we can find
a time when some of the questions we want to ask about are in
your previous incarnation. As this is your first meeting with
the Committee and we want to start off on a good basis, would
you like 10 minutes on some general questions before we get on
to the eUniversity just to limber you up?
Dr Howells: I would be delighted.
Q348 Chairman: When we were doing a recent
inquiry into the Transport Bill, we were enthused in our report
at children arriving at school aerobically excited!
Dr Howells: That was me! That
was my initiative!
Q349 Chairman: First of all, anyone who
reads the newspapers this morning will be concerned that the Committee
has been hearing, certainly as individual members, about the problems
with the student loans coming through to students and the problems
with computers and so on. Although we see you quoted in various
newspapers this morning, could you give us an update on just how
serious this situation is and how many students are in danger
of going without food and shelter.
Dr Howells: None is the answer
to that latter point. I asked for the latest figures and I received
them about 15 minutes ago, so would you like me to give them to
you?
Q350 Chairman: We would very much like
them, yes
Dr Howells: We had 817,882 applications
received and registered by LEAs and, of those, 738,219 were approved
and finalised within the LEAs. That, according to the mathematics
here, leaves 79,663 of which 13,828 have been refused or cancelled
because they were not eligible. So, the number left was 65,835
and those essentially are the ones that are still awaiting payment
or notification. Of that 65,835, 12,193 are students who did not
provide the information which LEAs were requiring, so that information
has gone back to them. Basically, outstanding are about 53,000
cases and all of those, as far as I know and I cannot give that
as an unequivocal answer, are ones received after the July deadline
when the information went out. As I am sure you know, there will
be people who would have applied for these loans even a few weeks
ago when they finally discovered that they had admission to a
university but it is still, as far as I am concerned, a very serious
number and we are working very hard to try to get it down.
Q351 Chairman: The Times this
morning said that terms started three months ago and, even by
my calculation, that seems an exaggeration, but nothing should
get in the way of a good story!
Dr Howells: I think generally
it is about seven weeks ago.
Q352 Chairman: An old interest of this
Committee was that we made a recommendation in our first report
on student finance that we were interested in students paying
a proper rate of return on the money they borrowed because we
thought, as that was such a great deal of money, that we could
in fact use that money, a considerable amount of money, to provide
grants for poorer students. The Government rejected that proposal
but at the same time did some quite sophisticated modelling, as
I understand, of those sums. There were other suggestions recently
that have been coming from Her Majesty's Opposition, for example,
in terms of a similar proposal. Can the Committee see any costings
that you might have of any proposals that you have received?
Dr Howells: I would be perfectly
prepared to share the modelling with you. My prints are not on
this set of models but, when I was the minister who was charged
with taking the first Tuition Fees Bill through Parliament—and
I still have the scars to prove it—then we did a lot of
modelling at that time and we were very worried that real rates
of interest would be very regressive in the sense that if women
took time off to have a family, they would find that that interest
was making that overall loan figure bigger and bigger and bigger
and we were very worried that that would result in those who earned
the least having the biggest bill to pay at the end of it and
I do not see that that is really any different now.
Q353 Chairman: The Committee, in its
original report, suggested that it should not be a commercial
rate of interest, it should be a small rate of interest that could
be charged only to those people who were from higher income backgrounds
and that could be used as a subsidy, as I said, for poor students.
As I understand it, at the time, that was modelled as well, long
after your time in the department.
Dr Howells: I remember us looking
at a very similar model at the time but I know it has been looked
at since and it has certainly been looked at in terms of the Higher
Education Bill this last time around.
Q354 Chairman: Would you share those
figures with the Committee if they exist?
Dr Howells: Yes, of course I will.[1]
Q355 Mr Jackson: I think we all know
from the debate we had a couple of weeks ago that the Minister
appreciates very, very much personally the extreme political sensitivity
of this whole question about university admissions and the operations
of OFFA and so forth and he knows how this interacts with the
media, how it gets certain vice-chancellors, quite legitimately,
very excited and perhaps above all how it can actually seep into
the schools and have demoralising and depressing consequences
for all sorts of very bright young people. I know that the Minister
is very sensitive to this but I do have the perception that the
bureaucracy with which he is associated in one form or another
does not have that sensitivity. So, I want to ask the Minister
two questions about that in the hope that he will say something
which will be communicated to those bits of the bureaucracy. First
of all, I would like to ask the Minister what he has done to follow
up his response to my intervention on his speech last week/10
days ago about HEFCE moving the goalposts by incorporating GMVQs
and ASs in the so-called benchmarks. He told me that he had not
been consulted about this/was not aware of it until it happened.
What has he done about the situation?
Dr Howells: I certainly answered
the right honourable gentlemen on this matter during the course
of the debate and what I told him was that I wanted to talk with
HEFCE and with HESA—I am just getting on top of these acronyms
and abbreviations now—to ask them why these figures suddenly
seem to be so out of sync with certainly what I had been expecting
and it seemed what the universities had been expecting. I had
a very interesting answer to this. We are certainly going to discuss
it and we are going to look at the nature of the figures and what
kinds of things are being measured and what should count and should
not count. I do not know about you, Mr Jackson, but the extraordinary
thing I found is that HESA is owned by the universities, it is
of the universities, the figures are produced by the universities,
albeit with HEFCE chairing the organisation, and I understand
that they were fully consulted on these figures, so they should
not have come as a surprise. It may be—and I do not know
this because I have not got that far into it yet—that, like
so much else in life, there was probably somebody who was dealing
with this within individual universities who probably thought
it is okay, this is not going to surprise anyone, and perhaps
it was not shared with the universities in question.
Q356 Mr Jackson: That is very likely.
Dr Howells: And it could well
have been that; it could have been as simple as that. I think
it disappointed a number of people who had been putting a lot
of hard work into trying to reach those parts of our communities
which traditionally had not sent students forward to university
and it goes for all kinds of universities, not just the ones who
are receiving the bulk of the research money like the Russell
Group but also those who are doing some terrific work like the
East London University, for example, and I think they were all
a little not shocked exactly but there was a collective sense
of surprise. Some of them seemed to have been happier at that
surprise, can I put it like that, than others were but I think
it is a bit of a mystery really.
Q357 Mr Jackson: I can see that the Minister
is concerned about this but it had a very unfortunate impact,
I must say, not perhaps particularly on universities but in the
way it was inevitably reported and that is the sensitivity which
seems to have been lacking in this part of the bureaucracy. If
I can come to my second question now. I know the new Access Regulator
personally and I have a great deal of respect for him. I listened
to him on the Today programme this morning where he talked
about targets for access in terms of social class—he used
the word "targets". He made a slip of the tongue in
which he talked about himself setting targets and then he corrected
himself and said that the institutions were setting targets. Would
the Minister confirm that it is absolutely not the policy of the
Government that the Access Regulator should be setting or should
be requiring institutions to set targets for admissions from different
social classes to our universities?
Dr Howells: Yes, I can confirm
that absolutely. OFFA—it seems to me and from my reading
of the regulations which I had to take through Standing Committee
I think on my first working day in this job, so you can imagine
the wonderful weekend I had reading them—is supposed to
have a dialogue with each of the universities and that dialogue
should review what it is that they are doing to create outreach
into various communities, in schools, FE colleges and so on and
what they are doing in terms of offering bursaries and any other
inducements that are there—the flow of information is a
very important one, for example—to make sure that, as an
institution, they are being stretched in terms of trying to widen
that base of application. What OFFA cannot do is order them to
have an admissions target and I think that is where the confusion
has come. What OFFA does is about applications. It is about trying
to encourage universities to reach beyond where they have got
to at the moment. I did not hear Professor Harris this morning
but I am sure he would agree with me—I hope he does anyway—that
he is not there to tell universities what they should or should
not do about admissions but he certainly is there to try and help
them stretch themselves over applications.
Q358 Mr Jackson: I thank the Minister
for that. The fact is that the Access Regulator did use these
words this morning, I heard him, and I have to say that I think
it was a very careless use of words. If the policy is as the Minister
says, I personally would support it and I think there would be
many people in the House, notwithstanding the views of different
parties, who think it is a reasonable approach but, if it is translated
into targets and quotas, then that support would be lacking and
rightly and deservedly lacking. Could I ask the Minister to send
the record of this discussion to Sir Martin Harris and ask him
to be a little more careful in the future in the way in which
he expresses himself in public about these matters and indeed
to ensure that he is clear in his own thinking of the Government's
understanding of what his role is.
Dr Howells: I can certainly do
that. Professor Harris has been a very, very distinguished academic
and a very fine Vice-Chancellor. I can only say to Mr Jackson,
whose opinion I always value as he knows, that I remember how,
in my very first week as Transport Minister, I was on a platform
when somebody stood up and asked, "Why does your department
spend half of its budget on the railways when only 6% of journeys
on wheels are by rail? Why don't you spend it on the motorways?"
I remember, because I thought it was a very clever thing to say
two or three days into this job, saying, "Because the country
is run by train spotters"! I suddenly realised that there
was this frozen section of the audience who were rail aficionados—
Q359 Mr Jackson: You mean you offended
a group of people!
Dr Howells: It is early days is
what I am saying.
Mr Jackson: The Minister is being his
usual disarming and charming self but I did find it rather astonishing,
after all that has been said and written and in our debate the
other day, to hear Sir Martin Harris making such an elementary
slip and it is very important that it should be corrected.
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