No less an authority than Erskine May describes the Commons second reading as “the first important stage through which the bill is required to pass; its whole principle is at issue, and is affirmed or denied by the House”.
The second reading of the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill was, in contrast, primarily a mechanism for the government to fill time before the Prime Minister’s statement on the Windsor Framework.
Though offputtingly technical, the measures in the current bill are every bit as transformational as the 2004 Higher Education Act, or the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act. Older readers will recall the packed benches and breathless coverage of the debates on those bills at that point – and compare the sparsely populated green benches we saw yesterday.
Clearly higher education funding reform isn’t the box office draw it used to be.
