Meeting of the Parliament (Virtual) 26 January 2021
I am a member of the Health and Sport Committee and I am pleased to take part in the debate. This is the very first time that I have had to deliver a speech remotely, so I apologise in advance if anything should go wrong.
The debate has been interesting. Daniel Johnson almost took on a Stewart Stevenson-esque tone in the part of his speech when he went through his family tree and spoke about those who were alumni of the University of St Andrews.
Donald Cameron is a member of the Health and Sport Committee, so it was surprising to hear him say something a wee bit different from what the committee discussed. In effect, we agreed that the bill is a way forward to ensure that we can get more GPs to work in our communities, particularly in rural areas, so that was a surprising speech from Mr Cameron.
As others have said, the bill is very technical. As the cabinet secretary said, it seeks to remove an archaic, unfair and anti-competitive prohibition that prevents the University of St Andrews from awarding medicine and dentistry degrees. I could stop there and save us all three or four minutes of our lives, but I will endeavour to go a little further.
As has been said, the prohibition was created in the mid-1960s to accommodate the separation of Queen’s College from the University of St Andrews so that Queen’s College could form the University of Dundee. That happened before I was even born. I am now 51 years old, and I assume that the bodies have achieved everything that they wanted to achieve by doing what they did way back in the 1960s. I know that the world of academia does not like change but, surely, after half a century, an argument can be made to look at things a wee bit differently and move forward.
One important point is that no other higher education institution in Scotland or the United Kingdom is prohibited by primary legislation from awarding degrees, in any discipline. It is clear that the Universities (Scotland) Act 1966 did not intend to prevent future competition between the University of St Andrews and any other higher education institution in Scotland or the rest of the UK. The bill will embed a fairer higher education sector and enable our valued institutions in Scotland to maximise the options that they offer students.
The Health and Sport Committee considered the bill at stage 1 and supports the principles of the bill. Repealing the provision in the 1966 act will allow the university to award a joint degree with the University of Dundee for the purposes of the ScotGEM degree.
The Scottish Government has timed the introduction of the bill to enable the University of St Andrews to award jointly with the University of Dundee medicine degrees to Scottish graduates from the medicine programme in advance of the first cohort graduating in 2022. Surely that is a good thing.
In my opinion, it is wrong to prevent any academic institution from offering a degree in a controlled subject in which its counterparts elsewhere can offer degrees. The committee heard evidence from other institutions, which, from what I could see, feel a bit threatened by the University of St Andrews getting involved in the field. However, the idea of competition and further options for students is a good thing.
Sometimes, we all broadly agree a way forward for a bill. Those times do not come around very often, but this should be and is one of them. I believe that the bill presents a positive way forward for the institutions involved. I encourage colleagues to agree with the bill’s general principles and to vote for it at decision time tonight.