I speak to Amendment 7 in this group, which seeks to put an additional general duty on what we are still calling the Office for Students. This general duty is to ensure that all English higher education providers—a term of art that we have now learned—have the same duties to make reasonable adjustments for students with disabilities. In Committee, we had very great confusion on this point. Some noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches hoped, and perhaps some still do, that the public sector equality duty could apply directly to English higher education providers—but it cannot, because not all of them will be public sector bodies; in fact, it may be that very few of them are public sector bodies. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that he thought that the public sector equality provision did not apply because universities were charities. However, it is part of the point of the legislation to
secure a diversity of types of providers, and they will not all be charities. In fact, many of them may be for profit.
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The great risk of the first part of the Bill is that the new entrants who will add to competition will most likely not be trying to compete at the top of the market. We have many very good universities, competing at the top of the market is very expensive and the tuition loans do not cover those costs. Universities that offer degrees in STEM subjects, for example, cannot cover their costs by the current level of tuition. Competition is a very different thing at the bottom of the market, where we may very well see for-profit providers coming in. I suggest that there is at present no reason why they should not be incorporated in other jurisdictions—for example, in the Cayman Islands, or they might be wholly owned by the Communist Party of China. There is nothing to prevent that, and I have an amendment later which I hope addresses that, up to a point.
On the question of disability, it is not enough to rely on the other clauses—for example, on Clause 3(1)(d), which assigns a general duty to,
“promote equality of opportunity in connection with access to and participation in higher education”.
Access and participation can be secured even if institutions do not take seriously making reasonable adjustments for those students who have disabilities. I emphasise “reasonable adjustments”, as a term that is, of course, important in the Equality Act 2010, because we all understand that the adjustments that have to be made vary with the particular disabilities involved. There is no uniform standard in these matters. Nevertheless, the criterion of requiring reasonable adjustments has stood the test of time; it is a way forward, and it should be a general duty on the Office for Students, as I must call it.