My Lords, I very much agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said and I am delighted that my name should be attached to his amendment. I shall not therefore repeat his powerful arguments but should like to add just one further thought.
As everyone in this House knows, the United Kingdom is second only to the United States in terms of the number of universities that it has in the top group of the world’s universities, not just in absolute terms but in all kinds of important subject areas such as engineering; figures last week showed that Cambridge, Imperial College and Oxford were still in the very top group. That was as much as the rest of Europe put together was able to provide.
There are many reasons why British universities are in the top group of world universities but one is that there is a free market in talent that enables them to attract it from all over the world, not only in the students but in the teaching staff. To some extent, there is a chicken and egg factor here. They are great universities partly because they can attract talent from all over the world, and because they can attract that talent they remain very good universities.
There is a similarity between the university world and financial markets. Neither of them is purely national. Both are totally international with seamless connections across the world. Therefore, if you try to turn us into an island and cut us off from this stream of talent that is crossing the world, you will do great damage to British universities. It will not show up in the short term, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, just pointed out. These things take a long time to show through. But it will very seriously damage over the long term the ability of the greatest British universities to remain in the top group—and not only them. For 15 years, I was chancellor of the University of Bath, a university that was founded less than 50 years ago. This has nothing to do with me because the outstanding vice-chancellors that it has had deserve the credit, but in the past 20 years the University of Bath has moved from obscurity not only into the top group in the United Kingdom but now into a number of world league tables as well. That is because it has both a student body and a faculty that are drawn from all over the world. In fact the previous vice-chancellor was American. It has had people from the Far East, North America, South America and all kinds of places.
I beg Ministers to consider the fact that clauses such as this one that we are seeking to amend have a deleterious effect on the ability of British universities to perform adequately on the world stage. We do not have so many institutions, so many industries and so many spheres of our national life that are indubitably regarded as absolutely among the best in the world. Universities are one and it would be extraordinary to kick them in the shins.