VIEW

Abstract

When the House of Commons resumes this month one of my first tasks as Opposition spokesman for education will be to press the Government to ‘come clean’ over the University Building Programme. This is an extraordinary and thoroughly discreditable business. Looking back to the last debate on education, at 8 am on 25 July after an all‐night sitting, I am forced to admit that Alice Bacon, replying for the Government, did just convey a hint that something unpleasant was in the wind: ‘Over the next few months’, she said, ‘there might be a readjustment as between primary schools and secondary schools and higher education’. I do not think anyone who heard those words would have guessed that, within a week, the universities would be subjected to a fresh ‘moratorium’ which would affect every item of their 1968/69 building programme (probably totalling between £15 and £20 out of £29 million) that remained uncommitted at the end of July, as well as capital expenditure on sites, furniture and equipment. The source of the bad news was a letter from the UGC, sent at a time when nearly every vice‐chancellor was in Australia, attending the Commonwealth Universities Conference. To date, no official announcement has ever been made by the DES.