Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2016
In light of the amendments that the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning has promised to lodge, the bill may at least recognise the strength of the model that is already in place in Edinburgh.
After many months of what the education secretary called “constructive engagement”, which was really much angst, she has finally explained to us how she intends to improve the bill. She says that she will do that by removing sections 8 and 13, which contain discretionary ministerial powers; detailing the elections and removing discretionary powers in that respect—that is all helpful in terms of the ONS point; and removing the cap on the size of the academic court. She also says that she recognises, and will ensure that the bill does not in any way inadvertently end, the system of rectors in the ancients where it exists.
Of course, not all of that has been done with good grace. The education secretary continues to argue that there is no ONS reclassification risk. As I have pointed out before, that is not good enough. We have been here before: we were promised that the ONS issue with colleges would be resolved. However, it never has been, and as a result colleges have had to resort to arm’s-length trust funds, which is an extremely unsatisfactory position. I would argue that all that angst has been unnecessary and all those things could have been avoided if only the bill had been properly drafted in the first instance.
From the word go, the education secretary said that ministers have no desire to use discretionary powers to change the governance of institutions in the future. That begs the question as to why they were in the bill in the first place. The truth is that we—not us in particular, but the sector itself—have lost a lot of time over the bill. That time would have been better spent on what the sector does best, which is to educate our young people, carry out world-class research and make an enormous contribution to our economy. The process has been far more of a diversion than it would have been had the bill been delivered properly.
This evening we will give the bill the nod because we support the principle of it, but we will also be shaking our heads at the incompetent shambles of its handling.
14:26