Lord Krebs (CB)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. I particularly thank my noble friend Lord Tarassenko for his excellent maiden speech and thank my noble friend Lord Mair for confirming that you cannot have too many engineers. I was beginning to worry about the balance on the Cross Benches but, fortunately, another newly appointed Cross-Bench Peer, my noble friend Lady Freeman, is, like me, a zoologist; she tells me that I taught her when she was an undergraduate at Oxford. So the balance is maintained, and I am grateful for that. With the level of expertise in the contributions, we have been very fortunate to have the wisdom and experience of two excellent former Universities Ministers —thank you very much—as well as many other noble Lords who have worked in the higher education sector and have direct personal experience. I do not intend at this late hour to summarise the many points that were made, but I turn to the Minister’s response, for which I thank her very much. Partly it was “wait and see”, because she said that the Government are reviewing the options for dealing with the current crisis. We have to hold our breath and hope that they come up with a solution. In the here and now, I hope I understood correctly that, on the question of research running at a deficit, the Government are minded to look for ways to increase cost recovery, so that the black hole that UKRI has identified can eventually be filled in. That I welcome very much. I think the Minister said that she agreed with me that the time is right to take a strategic view of the higher education sector, rather than simply leaving things to the vagaries of the market. I very much welcome that. The third point I picked up was that, although the Government want to be welcoming to overseas students —in my academic career I have taught and supervised graduate students from many different countries, and they have hugely enriched my academic experience and the quality of work that goes on in this country, so I am all in favour of them—they do not intend to change the cost of visas or the current visa restrictions. It will be interesting to see how the message, “We welcome you, but actually we are not removing some of the barriers stopping you coming here”, plays out. At this point, I simply once again thank all noble Lords who have participated, thank the Minister for her reply and close the debate.