Wharton: new OfS powers make registration fee hikes ‘necessary’

Additional roles handed to England’s higher education regulator will result in higher registration fees for universities, the chair of the Office for Students has indicated.

Giving evidence to a House of Lords committee that is investigating the role and performance of the OfS, Lord Wharton of Yarm said “significant new functions [coming] as a result of the Freedom of Speech bill” would lead to more work for the regulator, whose £30 million-a-year budget would need to increase. Under new legislation, the OfS will oversee the activities of students’ unions and investigate alleged breaches of free speech on campus.

In addition, the OfS has taken over the Quality Assurance Agency’s role as the designated quality body to ensure academic standards in English universities.

“No one wants to put fees up, but for these reasons, I think it is necessary,” said Lord Wharton, adding that he “hoped the financial impact will be relatively small” even though “any increase will be seen as significant in these times”.

The OfS’ annual registration fee – which is likely to exceed £200,000 for the largest universities next year if a proposed 13 per cent increase is approved by ministers – has become a source of contention among many institutions, but Lord Wharton rejected accusations that his organisation offered poor value for money, stating it cost just £12.82 per student.

The former Tory MP also dismissed claims that, as a sitting Conservative peer, he or the OfS had been unduly influenced by ministerial directions. “I have never allowed that I sit as a Conservative peer…to sway or influence the decisions that I take in my role as OfS chair,” he said.

He added that the OfS was stepping up its action to combat grade inflation, saying the sector had “not taken sufficient action on it over a very long period of time”.

“We are now in a place where we can take action…including investigations,” he continued.

On this front, the removal of the QAA from quality control duties was not a great loss, said Lord Wharton, who argued that it “feels like part of the old system” of regulation. The QAA’s reports “were not good enough for us to use in our regulatory decisions”, he added.

Its institutional subscription model had also meant that a “conflict of interest was built into the QAA’s work”, he continued, saying that it was “not credible to have a body operating in the interest of paying members while also making high-stakes regulatory decisions about these providers”.

On complaints that the OfS had a “distant relationship” with universities – which some vice-chancellors blame for an allegedly confrontational attitude and excessive red tape – Lord Wharton conceded that “there is some truth in that point”, adding that the OfS was seeking to “consolidate correspondence into fewer, more regular and more predictable letters and notes rather than ad hoc things being sent out”.

However, that “element of complaint” was, in some cases, linked to the fact that the OfS was “undertaking a significantly increased number of investigations”, he said.

Returning to the more collegiate type of relationship in which the regional teams of the OfS’ predecessor, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), would meet monthly with universities was not likely or preferable, Lord Wharton continued.

“We cannot and should not recreate the regular meetings of Hefce and institutions…though we try to be as open and accessible as we can,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com