Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 12 July 2017.
Back to, I think, the issue raised yesterday, Bangor University are facing, or staff are facing, 115 compulsory redundancies. The university says this is because they need to save £8.5 million to address significant financial challenges, and we understand a number of other universities across the length and breadth of Wales are considering how they’re going to square the financial circle in similar circumstances. We know that universities lost out on tens of millions of pounds taken from them and given in grants paid to English universities through the fees of students going over the border to study, something that your party and mine accepted from Labour couldn’t be done after your party and mine and Plaid voted to scrap student fees during the second Assembly. We also know that yesterday, Universities Wales, responding to your student support package, referred to having had to absorb the increases in costs since the introduction of the current tuition fee system in 2012. Following your announcement yesterday, therefore, how quickly will the savings generated actually generate greater funding being received by universities in Wales to hopefully mitigate against these tough decisions they’re having to take?