More than a third of UK universities are in financial doo-doo: staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible bankruptcy beckon. Behind this is the fact that domestic students paying £9,250 in fees (way behind inflation since that figure was last raised in 2017) cost £11,750 to teach, representing a collective annual £5 billion loss hitherto made up by international students paying £20,000 each. But the last government’s ban on foreign students bringing dependants with them has provoked dramatic falls in non-EU recruitment: bizarrely, the straw that’s breaking some universities’ backs is a 49 per cent decline in Nigerian students applying for one-year Master’s courses.
‘Anything short of an emergency rescue package for the sector will be insufficient to stave off catastrophe,’ trumpets the University and College Union – whose pay demands have deepened deficits and whose strikes have done huge damage to the student experience. I’d say the sector’s business model needs a radical redesign, in which courses that offer no job prospects should be scrapped but research that contributes to growth prospects (and the good of humanity) should be sacrosanct; in which bloated bureaucracies and cushy tenures should be fiercely reviewed and legitimate foreign students offered serious courses rather than milked for cash. Far more likely, I fear, is that Labour ministers will heed the union, kick the can down the road with a partial bailout – and blame it all on the Tories.
Digging and refilling
At His Majesty’s Treasury, the A303 tunnel will have been seen ever since it was green-lit in 2017 as an example of Keynes’s dictum that ‘two pyramids… are twice as good as one’. When you need economic stimulus, dig two holes in Wiltshire that might one day connect beneath Stonehenge. When you need spending cuts, as Rachel Reeves says she does, fill them in again: so it goes. But this column – in honour of my predecessor Christopher Fildes’s railway correspondent I.K. Gricer – is sadder to see the Reeves axe fall on the Restoring Our Railways scheme (launched in 2020 to promote local upgrades) for a piffling £85 million saving. Though it generated far more consultancy jobs than new stations or tracks, it really wasn’t a bad idea. I hope the ghost of Keynes appears in Downing Street soon and advises the Chancellor to reinstate it.
Manchester model
I wince at the thought of the eco-zealot Ed Miliband as ‘Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero’ – a title that’s a double hostage to fortune if ever there was one. But I’ll give him credit for appointing Jürgen Maier to chair Great British Energy, Labour’s £8 billion flagship for cleaner power.
A British-Austrian citizen whose family came to England when he was ten, Maier is the former UK head of the German industrial giant Siemens and is known to the London media chiefly as a critic of Brexit. But in Manchester, where Siemens has its UK base, he is hailed as a progressive industrial leader and one of a powerful inner circle – led by the late Sir Howard Bernstein as city council chief long before Andy Burnham’s rise as regional mayor – who drove a pragmatic public-private co-operation that transformed Greater Manchester’s economy and reputation. Maier also chaired the first company spun out of Manchester University to exploit its invention of graphene.
We’ll wait to see whether state-owned GB Energy can adapt the Manchester model to advance the twin objectives expressed in Miliband’s ministerial handle – especially since ‘energy security’ is directly threatened by his hostility to what’s left of North Sea oil and gas. But even Maier’s undoubted skills could never have delivered on Labour’s campaign claim that GB Energy would drive a £300 cut in household energy bills by 2030. That was a shameless election fiction and no wonder the government is backing away from it. If I were Maier, I’d have insisted the £300 promise should be buried before I agreed to take the job.
Give us a pubs tsar
Gordon Brown’s penchant for ‘goats’ – outsider appointees in his so-called ‘government of all the talents’ – took a comic turn when the CBI’s Digby Jones became a Whitehall-bashing trade minister; it descended into farce when Alan Sugar was named ‘enterprise tsar’ with a peerage to match. Team Starmer’s picks so far – Jürgen Maier, prisons minister James Timpson from the eponymous shoe-repair chain famed for employing ex-offenders, the clever barrister Richard Hermer as attorney general – have been better received. Next, I suggest, we need a ‘pubs tsar’: a high-profile entrepreneur charged with driving reforms to revive local hostelries, especially in places where Labour aims to plant new housing that will otherwise have no social hub of any kind.
Who could do it? Please not Tim Martin of Wetherspoons or television chef Tom Kerridge: enough of them already. My tips would be the serial hospitality investor Luke Johnson – or Rooney Anand, formerly of Greene King, latterly a player in pub-chain turnarounds. And why so vital? Because pubs crippled by wage inflation, business rates and VAT were closing in England and Wales in the first quarter at the grim rate of 80 per month, up 50 per cent on 2023.
These thoughts occurred as I criss-crossed Yorkshire for our marvellous Ryedale music festival: the number of shuttered village inns and roadside eateries has grown shockingly since last summer. In the interest of social cohesion, Labour’s growth ambition and your own wellbeing, I urge you to eat and drink heartily in this beautiful region while you still can. Try tapas at Omni in Malton or fine fish and chips at Thirsk’s White Horse Café; classic parmo (the north-east’s favourite breaded chicken under a cheese sauce blanket) at the Feathers in Helmsley; even aubergine curry at the Owl in hilltop Hawnby. And all at friendly prices.
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