There’s quite a few bills knocking around Parliament right now and it feels like herding cats keeping up with where each one is.
We’re keeping an eye on a few, the Renters’ Rights Bill, the Employment Rights Bill and the Better Busses Bill which has been renamed to the less exciting Bus Services 2.0 Bill.
At the same time we’re expecting a policy paper on freedom of speech sometime in Easter, an immigration white paper and a higher education policy paper in summer following the spending review.
It’s a great time to be a HE policy nerd.
As a quick reminder, and as of writing, here’s where each bill is *currently* and a link to follow their progress on the UK Parliament website.
- Renters’ Rights Bill (England) is in the House of Lords at committee stage (due to sit on 22nd April)
- Employment Rights Bill (UK-wide) is in the House of Lords at its second reading (due to sit on 27th March)
- Bus Services (No. 2) Bill (England) is in the House of Lords at report stage (due to sit on 26th March)
There’s also some lobbying in Scotland to be done on the Housing (Scotland) Bill – there’s a separate explainer on that on the site.
It sounds like a party in the Lords. Although it’s worth noting the housing and employment bill both started in the Commons and have travelled since to the Lords, whereas the bus bill originated in the Lords so a bit of work to go yet.
Of course you can keep up with each of the bills on the site, here’s links to the most recent explainers on housing, employment and buses.
There’s lots of challenges for students across these bills that many SUs will likely want to raise with elected officials, but how?
Hearts and minds
Lobbying is often about statistics and facts. But it’s also about stories and emotions.
And when you combine the two you drive decision makers because you’ve made them feel and made them realise it’s not limited to one case study.
Lobbying is most successful when stories and stats make their way into university committees or in arenas more powerful like devolved government or Parliament.
Armed with your stats and stories, when meeting with an MP, here’s a few tips:
- Look at the last ten things they’ve said in public
- Listen, as well as talk
- Be useful, they want to see the SU as a credible organisation to speak to
- Politicians like people, not things
- Think about the optics (and their optics)
But it’s not always about meeting an MP, with bills and legislation sitting across national, local and devolved governments there’s more than one access point and more than one way to get students’ voices heard.
Here’s 10 different ways to lobby on legislation.
- Find a Lord
These bills don’t just sit in the Commons, they move! A lot are in the Lords right now and that means you can chat to a Lord to try and get students’ voices in the room.
It’s worth looking to see if you have a member of the Lords on your university governing body, or a Lord that’s an alumni of the university or is even just from the town or city your university is in.
Send them a letter, an email, stop them in the street and see if they’re willing to submit questions.
The House of Lords Register of Interests lists Lords’ affiliations with organisations, including universities. You can search for your institution or relevant keywords to identify peers with direct or indirect links.
If that fails, you can analyse debates and committee memberships on TheyWorkForYou or Hansard records to identify Lords who have spoken about universities or student related topics.
Make them see
Whoever you do meet with – a Lord, a Council member, a mayor – it’s important for them to consider the SU as a credible source of information. This is about presenting useful evidence that they can return to if they ask a parliamentary question or something they can use in a briefing.
Stats and stories are important, but you can be creative with how you present these. You could use videos of student anecdotes, bring students into the room or one of my favourite ideas from Hull’s Northern Voice Conference earlier this year was a “choose your own adventure” book for elected officials to better understand the student experience.
If you’ve never seen it, have a look at this student life sim game put together by Helsinki Uni SUa few years back. They got university officials, politicians and civil servants to play it so they better understood the realities of student life today.
Meet with local politicians
A lot of policy is already, or on its way to being, devolved. Local issues may be better resolved by working with local politicians, these could be local community forums or a metro mayor.
In Greater Manchester, Nottingham and soon in London, several SUs have set up student partnerships to influence the mayor on collective regional issues affecting students like transport, housing and community relations.
When lobbying on national issues it’s important to map the issues against where power lies, sometimes this is closer than you might think and conversation with the local transport authority might be more effective than lobbying on the buses bill.
All party parliamentary groups
All party parliamentary groups (APPGs) are informal cross-party groups that have no official status in Parliament but are run by Members of the Commons and Lords. They’re an opportunity to get people with shared interests in a room to better understand different topics and there’s one on students and another on international students.
The APPG for students brings student issues to Westminster and connects SUs, students and decision makers together. Alex Sobel MP is the Chair and NUS acts as the group’s secretariat. The APPG met last year on housing and are meeting again soon to discuss funding for home undergraduates.
This is for people who likely already care about students but being involved in this space and submitting evidence to them allows them to better understand the realities of the student experience and can bring other MPs along with them.
Calls for evidence
For most bills in Parliament there is a call for evidence at the committee stage. These are often open calls with a deadline which can often come forward if they want to close it early.
Sending in stats, student stories, data and evidence that explains problems or opportunities with various bills is another opportunity to have students’ voices heard by decision makers.
Earlier this year University of Manchester SU submitted to the Renters’ Rights Bill call for evidence and was noted in subsequent documentation.
Community organising
More and more SUs are getting involved with community organising methods as part of their advocacy work and Citizens UK already provides many opportunities for students to get their voice heard in the wider community.
Citizens UK chapters are broad based alliances of community organisations from across communities and regions. These include schools, community groups, places of worship, unions and universities and SUs.
Community organising is about bringing people together to win change, building community-led solutions to big and small problems, that work for everyone.
Rather than working solely as an individual SU, working with other organisations on shared goals like housing and transport can provide another opportunity for students’ issues to be heard as part of the wider civic agenda.
Citizens UK organise citizens assemblies which are powerful tools to seek public commitments from politicians, sometimes before they take office, which can be used to hold them to account. These are another way to get students’ voices integrated as part of the local community.
Activism across SUs
And just like community organising, SUs don’t have to work alone. Examples of collective activism like the Greater Manchester Student Partnership and Nottingham Student Partnership highlight SUs working together across regions on similar local issues, often focused on their local combined authority.
There are a huge number of different mission groups for universities but not so many for SUs.
The Russell Group SUs is a collective of SUs at Russell Group universities representing over 700,000 students. They work together to ensure the student experience at their universities reflect the world class reputation and have responded together to consultations like the Office for Students’ new strategy, spending budgets, and increase in tuition fees.
A collective vision
Last year Universities UK (UUK) published a blueprint for change from the UK’s universities, entitled Opportunity, growth and partnership.
UUK are an advocacy pressure group who work with the government and higher education sector to champion UK higher education. They have 141 members who are vice chancellors or principals of UK universities and try to influence policy and opinion, bring universities together to take collective action and provide insight into universities.
With a new government and rapidly concerning university finances, they decided to do their own review of the sector instead of the government doing one too late. They took matters into their own hands.
There was no vision for the future of the student experience and SUs can play a vital role in articulating that to elected officials (MPs, devolved government, metro mayors), to the media and wider society and to government by creating their own types of blueprint.
Creating collective visions with evidence bases, publishing and promoting them across SUs, regions and creating a manifesto for the student experience produces something to influence elected officials. It was successful for UUK if you look at Bridget Philipson’s speech on increasing tuition fees, so why not give it a go.
Media
Last year the President at Lancaster SU spoke on BBC’s Question Time about the impact the cost of living crisis is having on students. Live television and social media commentary meant more and more members of the public, from that one question, understood the realities of student poverty.
Ringing up local radio stations, sending press releases, speaking to local and national media is a way to get your asks and message across. If elected officials are ignoring the interests of students, shift the media landscape by making these issues so loud they can’t be silenced.
Interactive campaigns
Getting students interested in local activism on things like consultations or calls for evidence is no easy task. Many will think it’s boring, won’t have an impact or don’t feel that they belong in those towns and cities enough to engage with local decision making.
However, at Sheffield Hallam SU they were able to change the tide by engaging students in a consultation on buses through creative storytelling.
The officers created a ten foot testimony – a huge piece of paper – with lots of student stories and anecdotes of students’ experiences of the bus network, articulating their asks. They used this creative exercise to encourage students to respond to the consultation but they also created a brilliant piece of art that they can use as part of their activism. Spoiler alert, Hallam have since been successful at lowering bus prices for students across the region.
Read more
To protect students’ interests, SUs should step up their efforts on lobbying
How to be “positively pushy” to get things done for students
Rethinking lobbying at the Hull Northern Voice Conference
Community organising can make a difference in local action
Students making changes on transport
We want Greater Manchester to be the best place for students to live in this country
thanks for shouting out our Cheaper Transport Campaign at Hallam SU!!