My Lords, I welcome particularly the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. The official doctrine has always been that a university can go bust, but I was never able to contemplate the political feasibility of a scenario where a padlock is swinging on the gates of a university, with a group of students outside desperate to go in for their history lectures and being told, “I am terribly sorry; we’re closed”, while tumbleweed blows through the campus. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher faced this in 1985 in Cardiff. She was not willing to allow University College, Cardiff to go bust. I think that we can accept that we are functioning in an environment where in reality it will be very hard just to say, “Bad luck. You’ve done 18 months of a course and it’s come to an end”.
The question is how one should address that, which gets to the heart of some quite important issues in the Bill. There has been a fashionable doctrine for a few years of the ABTA solution—and some kind of scheme like that could be made to work—but in my experience the closest we got to this problem was clearly HEFCE. It was acting as the co-ordinator, organiser and convenor. It might have been that students had to be located at several other universities and it would get different universities to make their contributions so that students would be educated. If we get into such a scenario—my
noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right that we have to contemplate it—it is very hard to see how it could be resolved without some convening power for the OfS, which, as I have said in other contexts in this Committee stage, is in many respects the son of HEFCE. A lot of our problems will be resolved if we think of it as the son of HEFCE. My noble friend’s proposal to make it clear that there is some legal responsibility for OfS must be an important and credible part of any solution. It is not credible to imagine that the matter could be addressed via an ABTA-type scheme.