‘Crumbling’ universities are ‘worse than expected’, says Starmer

British universities are “crumbling” and in an even worse state than the new government expected, the prime minister has told trade union leaders.

Appearing at the conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Sir Keir Starmer laid into the record of the previous Conservative government, saying his new administration had been left to pick up the pieces, including inheriting a higher education sector in crisis.

“Even in our worst fears, we didn’t think it would be this bad,” the Labour leader said of the state of the country’s finances more generally.

“The pollution in our rivers; the overcrowding in our prison. So much of our crumbling public realm: universities, councils, the care system. All even worse than we expected,” he added.

Labour has faced repeated requests from university leaders to either raise tuition fees or increase public subsidy as institutions continue to lose money on educating domestic students because of rising costs.

Last week, King’s College London vice-chancellor Shitij Kapur told Universities UK’s conference that the level of funding needed for institutions to break even in England was closer to between £12,000 and £13,000 per student, with the alternative “managed decline”.

Ministers have stressed that “all options remain on the table” but have so far rebutted calls for more funding, instead focusing on revising the remit of the regulator, the Office for Students, and creating a more welcoming environment for international students.

Without offering any new solutions, Sir Keir said that the “crisis we have inherited means we must go deep into the marrow of our institutions, rewrite the rules of our economy, fix the foundations – so we can build a new home”.

He said he wished to “turn the page on politics as noisy performance once and for all” and repeated promises to scrap minimum service level legislation that could have placed extra restrictions on university staff’s right to strike.

Jo Grady, the general secretary of the University and College Union, called on the prime minister to “move on from blaming the Tories and start rebuilding Britain” as she called for “higher taxes on the rich and massive public investment” to save institutions.

“We welcome the prime minister’s acknowledgement that universities are crumbling, but Labour is allowing them to decay,” she said.

The party “still refuses to lift Tory visa restrictions on international staff and students”, Dr Grady said, referring to the ban on students below PhD level bringing their dependants with them to the UK and extra visa costs that many institutions have said are prohibitive when attempting to hire staff internationally.

“The government must do much more to protect our world-leading institutions, including providing emergency funding to protect jobs and prevent any university from going under,” Dr Grady added.

UCU passed a motion at the TUC congress calling for more investment in post-16 education as the “engine of national renewal”.

The sector “like the rest of the UK's infrastructure, is on its knees: underfunded, undervalued and underpaid,” Dr Grady told delegates.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com