Labour should set up a commission on higher education funding, potentially leading to a full review if it enters government, to head off “pending financial disaster” in the English sector, former education secretary Lord Blunkett has urged.
The Labour peer made the call in a session at the Universities UK annual conference at the University of Manchester.
“If we are to transform our productivity, achieve the growth needed to fund investment in public services and meet the economic and social challenges of a rapidly changing world, universities must be acknowledged as playing a central role in this transformation,” Lord Blunkett said.
He highlighted the need for lifelong learning to meet the demands of different workplaces in the future and the need for further and higher education to help “kick-start the economies of those parts of the country currently at the wrong end of the productivity gap across the nation”.
He also noted the way universities make “a direct contribution to local economic growth and individual aspiration, but also provide the technical and academic skills needed to achieve net zero and meet the workforce needs of high-tech solutions to healthcare, construction, energy and ageing”.
Lord Blunkett continued: “In facing the pending financial disaster in funding for higher education, which has already seen a drop of well over 20 per cent, in real terms, over the last five years, there is urgent need to set up a commission – ideally with cross-party agreement, to report by early 2025.
“But if the government is not prepared or willing to put the needs of the UK first, then the Labour opposition must, in my view, establish a broad-based commission of their own in the early new year, which if successful in the general election would be transformed into the final stages of a government-led review. Only in this way can we ensure that every idea currently on the table can be brought together, and solutions implemented quickly.”
The former home secretary also said it “makes absolute sense to take the full-time higher education students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, out of the now completely flawed migration statistics”.
Meanwhile, it was crucial, Lord Blunkett continued, that “universities avoid the elephant traps and pitfalls that currently exist in an era where identity politics and anti-intellectualism, in very different ways, pose a threat to the standing and status of the university sector.
“The experience because of Covid, and latterly because of industrial action, has been deeply unfortunate for so many young people. Vital now to put this behind us and to ensure that there is a coherent and collective voice for higher education in making the unanswerable case for embracing this outstanding asset at our disposal.”
