Hillman holds his hands up over RAB charge ‘mistake’

Source: Russell Sach

Nick Hillman, former special adviser to David Willetts, takes an unusual tack in his first interview as director of the Higher Education Policy Institute: owning up to a mistake in government.

Under former director Bahram Bekhradnia, Hepi savaged the coalition government from 2011 onwards for basing its £9,000 fees system on an underestimate of the portion of loan outlay that would never be repaid by graduates (known as the resource accounting and budgeting, or RAB, charge). In 2012, Mr Willetts hit back, labelling the Hepi analysis “eccentric”.

But speaking to Times Higher Education, Mr Hillman said of Mr Bekhradnia: “We were on opposite sides of the RAB charge debate, and I’ve got to say he’s won it. The Hepi analysis has turned out to be correct, and even the government now pretty much accepts that.”

Mr Hillman published his first pamphlet as Hepi director on 20 February. It looks at eight “pinch points” in sector regulation left by the government’s failure to introduce a higher education bill – with the question of the “level playing field” for private providers looming large.

One issue he examines in the pamphlet is the fee cap, set at £6,000 for private providers and £9,000 for publicly funded universities.

Three options are floated by Mr Hillman in the pamphlet – including “extending the freedom to impose higher fees” to universities and allowing them to charge above the £9,000 cap (the pamphlet does not endorse any of the options).

Mr Hillman told THE: “If Oxford’s argument is that it really costs £16,000 to educate someone who comes to Oxford, prove it. I’ve been asking Oxford and Cambridge for that data for many years…If the people who want a higher fees cap are serious about it, they haven’t yet made the case sufficiently.”

He said his personal view was that “as a nation we benefit from having a higher education sector…I haven’t yet heard a strong enough argument for losing the sense of a single coherent sector, which you would lose the minute you moved to differential fees.”

The goal of the pamphlet, he said, was “to be a vehicle to press all the political parties: ‘What are your opinions on these eight pinch points?’…If they are not prepared to legislate, they need to explain the rationale for the status quo.”

Does his past as a Tory special adviser on higher education mean that he will find it impossible to be impartial in his new role?

“My first pamphlet shows I’m not going to be a patsy and constantly defend the status quo. I think there are problems with the status quo,” he said.

But the upside of his Whitehall experience was his knowledge of the relationships between the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Treasury and No 10, and of “how evidence and research is digested within Whitehall”, he said.

Mr Hillman defined the job of Hepi as being to “help policymakers by giving them evidence and research”, but also “to stop them saying unwise things”.

Meanwhile, he admitted that his new post means a boost in salary, after rumours that he will be paid more than £100,000 a year. “I took a pay cut to be a special adviser, and I took a pay rise to be Hepi director,” he said. But he added that his take-home salary was “less than £100,000”.

john.morgan@tsleducation.com