CAF and our friends at Alumni for Free Speech have written to the House of Commons Library, warning that its recent briefing, Freedom of Speech in Universities, downplays self-censorship at the very moment the new regulatory regime’s main enforcement mechanism – the OfS complaints scheme – remains uncommenced and vulnerable to being quietly shelved.
The House of Commons Library is relied upon by Members and their staff as a source of authoritative, non-partisan analysis, and its briefings shape how policymakers, universities, regulators and the wider public understand contested legislative questions. The Library’s Editorial Policy accordingly commits it to “accuracy and impartiality” and, when covering politically controversial topics, to presenting “a variety of views and sources” so that Members may understand the range of opinion.
Few areas place that obligation under greater strain than the university free-speech debate. The passage of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act through Parliament was unusually fraught precisely because it brought to the surface substantial disagreements about the nature and scale of constraints on lawful speech in higher education. Over the past five years, Parliament, the Office for Students and the sector have diverged sharply on the seriousness of the problem, the empirical proxies by which it should be assessed, and whether existing legal and regulatory powers were in fact sufficient without additional legislation.
That’s why questions of “accuracy and impartiality” are particularly acute here: the briefing isn’t an archival account of a settled regime, but a snapshot of a framework that remains unfinished, and therefore politically revisable.
Although the Act has been partially commenced, its most significant remaining enforcement mechanism, the statutory Office for Students complaints scheme for academic staff who consider their free-speech rights to have been breached, remains uncommenced pending primary legislation to amend it. In June 2025, the Department for Education confirmed that it would “seek a legislative vehicle at the earliest opportunity” to make those changes.
But when will that be? The problem is that there’s nothing in the forthcoming parliamentary timetable that obviously serves as such a vehicle, making it unlikely to secure Royal Assent until the late 2020s at the earliest. In that context, the way the Library frames the evidence can materially shape how MPs and others assess both the nature of the problem and the urgency – or otherwise – of completing the regime, including whether the complaints scheme is treated as essential or quietly allowed to drift.
Our core concern in the letter is methodological – and whether, on a live and contested issue, the Library’s framing properly reflects the range of serious views, rather than nudging readers towards the reassuring conclusion that self-censorship is marginal.
The briefing relies heavily on an OfS-commissioned YouGov staff survey, and its summary material frames self-censorship as affecting only “a minority” of academics, notwithstanding the finding that 21% of respondents felt “not very” or “not at all” free to discuss challenging or controversial topics in their teaching.
Whether one regards that as a “minority” rather than, say, “a significant proportion”, the deeper problem is that while a representative survey can estimate a sector-wide average, it does not, by itself, show that the relevant pressures are evenly distributed across disciplines, subject-areas, institutions, or career stages. In other words, pooled averages can look reassuring – or at least less significant – while masking concentrated pockets of constraint in precisely the domains where controversies are most likely to arise. One can easily imagine a sector-wide mean that appears tolerable while, in a small number of contested fields, departments or institutions, the perceived professional costs of dissent are markedly higher — and it is in those pockets that norms, policies and enforcement episodes are most likely to shape behaviour.
The point is not to deny the existence of a sector-wide mean, but to caution against treating the mean as descriptive of the distribution of constraints in precisely those domains where controversies are most likely to arise. Without at least acknowledging this distributional issue – or attempting any disaggregation – the briefing invites ecological inference from a sector-level estimate to claims about typical experience.
The government-commissioned Sullivan Review on barriers to research on sex and gender illustrates the clustering problem. It did not attempt population-level prevalence estimates, but documented barriers within a single contested domain. Self-censorship and “chilling effects” were the most frequently reported barrier (58% of respondents), and the Review suggests these pressures can be socially reinforced within local working environments, rather than arising solely from individual disposition.
We have therefore urged the Library to revise the summary and landing-page wording on self-censorship, and add a caveat about the limits of sector-wide averages and the possibility of clustering. We have also made clear that the Library should strengthen its treatment of self-censorship as an institutional outcome shaped by incentives and risk, not merely a headline percentage, so that MPs and their staff aren’t left with an over-settled impression of a live and contested issue.
If the Library declines to make these limited amendments, we intend to circulate a short briefing to MPs setting out our concerns in accessible terms.
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.