My Lords, I chair Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, which is part of the university sector. I feel, rising at this stage, a bit like an actor rising to play the porter in “Macbeth”. There have been hours of drama and extraordinary debate about matters of deep principle. I have to make a speech, if I can, that at the same time is amusing but makes a serious point. I am supposed to do it when
three-quarters drunk. Unfortunately, I am not three-quarters drunk—there was not time during the dinner break to get that way—so I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I try to square this circle as the porter did.
A well-reputed blog of the higher education sector called, even more peculiarly than the office, Wonkhe, this morning said that there was no chance that the House of Lords would accept this amendment because the resulting body would be called OfHE. I must say that I thought that that was quite a strong argument for the name that I was proposing because “offie” is somewhere you really want to go down to—“go and buy a bottle from the offie”—whereas going for a meeting at the Office for Students sounds extraordinarily tedious and dull. However, it is not on that that I am relying in going for a change of name.
I say “going for a change of name” because I am not convinced that the name that I propose is in every regard absolutely perfect. It could be said that there are many things in higher education that lie outside the field of the OfS and there are certainly some things that lie within it—so I do not guarantee that the alternative that I proffer this evening, Office for Higher Education, is absolutely perfect. All I would say is that it is a great deal more perfect than the option that the Government have presented us with: OfS. I have no idea where “OfS” came from. I envisage in my “Yes Minister” mind a meeting with a special adviser there who said, “Yes, Minister, we could call it anything you like, but we did jolly badly in those university towns at the last election. OfS, so we appear to be on the side of students, would be a good title”—and these things tend to stick.
But the name is clearly inappropriate because much of what it is planned that OfS shall do has very little to do with students. Is registering universities a job for the OfS? Is removing the title from certain universities done in the interest of students? Is fee setting done in the interest of students? Actually, if you come to think of it, the strongest opponents of the Bill have been students, who are now trying to engineer a revolt against the teaching excellence framework. So if we must use this sort of title, perhaps it would be better to call it the Office against Students—which is the effect that I expect this Bill to have; I expect it not to be a successful Bill from the point of view of furthering the student interest.
More seriously, we have to be very careful before importing into our legislation titles which serve a propaganda purpose—who can be against OfS, against students or, in America, against patriots? Before long, we find that the whole of political language has ceased to be neutral in legislation and is starting to slip off into a language from the post-truth era where the titles of things no longer represent their reality but rather a sort of Orwellian other world in which things no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. Such propaganda reasons are not good reasons for the title of an institution.
At this time of night I do not want to detain the Committee further; this is a probing amendment to see whether the Government are at all interested in finding a better name. In the meantime, I will offer
unconditionally to any Member of the House who can come up with a better title than I have—Office for Higher Education—a bottle of champagne, provided they can at the same time convince the Minister to accept it. I beg to move.