I have a number of amendments in this group and before talking to them generally I want to say how much I agree with almost everything that has been said so far in this short debate. The Minister and other noble Lords have on a number of occasions emphasised the importance of not getting too hung up on detail, not giving too many detailed and restrictive instructions to the OfS. My concern is with these general clauses, which define what sort of institution this is and its general remit. The problem is that the definition it is not general enough. So much of what is said is focused on the development of individual institutions—their financial health; their particular policies and progression statements.
I strongly support Amendment 58 because it would insert the word “diversity”. Surely what we want in a 21st-century higher education system is not simply choice between lots of institutions that are actually very similar but genuine diversity. I do not think, for reasons that I could bore your Lordships with for an hour but will not, that the current approach will generate diversity. It will generate new institutions but it will not in and of itself generate diversity.
It is absolutely critical that the central office that represents our Government has as one of its concerns the need to generate not just competition between similar institutions—not just choice between ever more institutions that look much the same—but genuine diversity. That will require quite a lot of thought and active intervention—pump-priming, whatever. Many of these amendments, including those that have my name on them, are about the need to secure and improve the overall strength and quality of higher education provision in England, to maintain confidence in the higher education sector as a whole.
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I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It has to be about not just the financial health of individual institutions but the financial health and viability of the higher education sector. You have to look at whether or not institutions are in a position to generate new ideas and new courses and, if they are not, what the OfS can do about it. It must look at this more broadly and not just at individual institutions. Unless it does so, new courses are not likely to come up because the safe approach is always to do more of what other people are doing—maybe a bit more cheaply or with more effective marketing, but basically to continue the pattern of the past few years, which is that we get more and more alternative providers but they all offer the same thing.
I hope—and I would like to hear from the Minister—that in the final version of the Bill there will be far more at the top, where the OfS board will look at it, so that everybody will be clear that this is what this institution is about and there is far more about the
OfS’s duty to the sector and to the country as a whole, to take a leading role and, above all, to look not just at competition in a narrow sense but at securing genuine, high-quality diversity. I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether the Government are minded to think about this.