Getting serious about cutting the HE regulatory burden

There’s a big change happening in government and much speculation about what it might all mean for higher education. At this point it is all speculation and very little certainty so it would be a shame not to join in.

Various news reports have indicated that Andy Haldane, previously chief economist at the Bank of England among other roles, is continuing to provide advice to incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham on his growth agenda. 

Back at the beginning of 2025 Haldane wrote a piece for the Financial Times  in which he argued for a massive slashing of regulation:

The instincts of the new US administration are to raze the regulatory tower to the ground and only then to build back on a needs-must (or needs-Musk) basis.

By design, this scorched-earth approach delivers a system shift in culture and practice. It eliminates the deadweight costs of regulatory overshoot at the risk of undershoot.

Of course since then, this kind of scorched earth or chainsaw-led regulatory reduction has acquired something of a poor reputation. 

The US model

In the USA, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency seems to have massively over-promised and under-delivered in the short period of its existence. Accompanying the various claimed efficiencies, reductions in regulation and cuts to many federal agencies, the department is said to have resulted in many hundreds of thousands of deaths overseas following huge reductions in foreign aid programmes.

Haldane’s observation that building from a low regulatory base is greatly preferable to over-regulation sounds persuasive and after writing on academic quality assurance and regulation more generally for many years now, it does offer considerable attractions.

Because, despite all the exceptionally erudite and persuasive arguments I and many others have put forward over the years for the benefits of reducing HE regulation, at least just a wee bit, the overall effect – with one significant exception – has been the opposite of that wished for. Regulation has grown and grown and the burden and cost on institutions has increased commensurately.

As this largely indicative vibe-based graph shows (even AI couldn’t come up with this kind of stuff)…

…the burden of higher education regulation has continued to grow and grow over the years with the only noticeable brief dip being the discontinuation of TQA. Since then though the growth has been inexorable.

Plenty of savings to be made

I wrote a while back about the savings opportunities that existed if government decided to cut some and defer other regulatory measures. The various suggestions – which I still stand by – could save the English sector some £500m a year by my reckoning. This would just about offset the predicted £440m lost through the taxation of institutions via the International Student Levy and the £51m cut from government’s Strategic Priority Grant. 

There are plenty more opportunities too I’m sure. But when government, in its Post-16 Skills White Paper last year, proposed removing the external examiner system – part of the regulatory landscape with lots of hidden costs which has long outlived its usefulness in a mass higher ed system – there were howls of protest from across the sector. Similarly, I can recall being roundly rebuffed when proposing the ending of TEF to a group of Vice-Chancellors whose level of support for this hugely burdensome, pointless and costly piece of regulation was strongly aligned to their institutions’ previous TEF rating. 

So perhaps it is time to take a punt on Andy Haldane’s scorched earth proposal. As he says, the risks of under-regulation are far less than the cost and burden of the significant over-regulation of higher education we have now. 

Towards a light touch regulatory future

Many of the features needed for light-touch but effective assurance of academic standards and the quality of education will remain in place and the cornerstones of academic quality assurance will be, rightly, the professionalism of academic staff and the operation of the institution as a self-critical academic community.

Whether it is scorched earth or chainsaw-based reduction, if addressing the regulatory burden on higher education does become a target for the new Prime Ministerial team then that will be very welcome news indeed for a beleaguered sector.