Three Nobel Prize winners have now added their names to an open letter launched by CAF and other free speech campaigners, urging the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, to stop stalling on the free-speech complaints scheme promised under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (HEFSA).
They are joined by hundreds of other academics across the UK. The letter has already passed 300 signatories and is fast approaching 400, in a sign of growing alarm within the sector that a core element of the Government’s free-speech reforms is being left to wither.
The main duties in HEFSA came into force on 1 August 2025 and are supported by robust guidance from the Office for Students (OfS). But with the statutory tort repealed and the complaints scheme still not commenced, there is no practical route for individuals to enforce those duties.
This is not what ministers promised. On 15 January 2025, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told Parliament, “there must be a route for righting wrongs” and pledged to retain an OfS complaints scheme. A Department for Education policy paper in June reiterated that the Government would “seek a legislative vehicle at the earliest opportunity” to amend and implement the scheme.
Yet no such legislative vehicle has appeared. In a recent written answer to crossbench peer Lord Alton – who asked what assessment the Government had made of CAF’s warning that the complaints scheme may not be fully operational until 2030 – Baroness Jacqui Smith repeated that ministers are still “seeking a suitable legislative vehicle”, and suggested that staff can already rely on judicial review or employment tribunals.
In practice, neither route is an adequate substitute. Judicial review is a remedy of last resort, tightly constrained and prohibitively expensive. As long ago as 2016, public law practitioners cited in a Ministry of Justice consultation were estimating costs in the region of £30,000–£50,000 to take a claim from permission to a substantive hearing, with the additional risk of being ordered to pay the other side’s costs. More recent cost schedules suggest that exposure in a fully contested case can easily exceed £100,000.
Employment tribunals, meanwhile, have no jurisdiction to enforce HEFSA duties and are already struggling with a heavy caseload. Taking a high-complexity discrimination claim all the way to a final hearing typically involves legal fees running into tens of thousands of pounds. The number of tribunal claims has risen markedly in recent years, with official figures indicating that the backlog of unresolved cases stood at over 61,000 by September 2025 – an increase of more than a quarter in just nine months. Little wonder, then, that employment lawyers now report unfair-dismissal and discrimination claims typically wait around 12 months just to be listed for hearing.
In the meantime, the consequences on the ground are real. Since HEFSA commenced, we have seen universities continue to force ideological conformity on staff, an academic suspended for noting that controversial words have contextual meaning, and another leading professor instructed to cease research into human-rights abuses in China.
The complaints scheme was designed as an accessible route to resolve disputes, and to build up a body of practical case law to guide the sector. Without it, the promise of HEFSA will remain unfulfilled.
If you share these concerns, please consider adding your name to the open letter and sharing it with colleagues and networks.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.