Labour MP Alan Whitehead, formerly a professor at the Southampton Institute for Higher Education, said Lord Nolan had failed to distinguish between the old and new sectors in giving university governance a relatively clean bill of health last year. Mr Whitehead, speaking in a Commons adjournment debate, said the recent dispute at the Southampton Institute was only the latest in a string of disputes in former local authority institutions freed from local authority control in 1988, and called for a much wider base of governor election and appointment.