The Robbins Report was not produced (paras 1-2) out of a political vacuum. The Government had been alerted to the future funding dilemmas posed by the likely increase in the demand for student places in higher education by the Treasury through the University Grants Committee (UGC) and appointed Lord Robbins as a safe pair of hands (with a strong Treasury background as well as holding a leading university position). The Committee began meeting in 1961 but the context to the public reaction to its forecasts was strongly linked to an event in Parliament in March 1962 when the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Henry Brooke) announced that he had rejected the UGC’s building programme for the anticipated expansion and deferred its increased number targets from 1967/8 to 1973/4.
This produced public outrage and, in the House, from the Government’s own ranks as well as from Labour. This was the first time that the UGC’S targets had been turned down, and the decision was taken on financial grounds and had been taken while Robbins was still sitting. With a General Election just round the corner, the denial of opportunity to qualified applicants was just the publicity the Government did not want. When I asked Edward Heath when he paid a visit to the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) much later why the Government had accepted Robbins’ expansion figures so readily on publication he simply answered ‘We had no choice’ (Shattock, M L Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945-2011 McGraw-Hill/Open University Press 2012 p 121).
It is correct to say that Robbins did not sort out student finance (para 3). In 1963, however, just before a General Election, the Government was desperate to erase the impact of the decision it had taken in the previous year. Treasury files in the National Archive show that in drafting its evidence to Robbins, Treasury officials were very conscious of the likely future costs of the expansion and considered tuition fees, student loans, two-year degrees and greater use of part-time education as ways of ameliorating costs. It is hard to see why Robbins committed himself to a view that the growth in the economy would cover the expansion costs when forecast GDP growth in the Treasury evidence to the Committee was only around 2.5%.
